How many times have you been asked by friends or family to follow a business page on social media in order to promote the organization behind it? Invitations of this sort are issued all the time. There is something similar in PPC advertising, and it’s not good. Just clicking ads doesn’t help your favorite advertisers as much as you think. It could even hurt them.
PPC (pay per click) advertising is the bedrock of paid online ads. PPC ads appear on search engine results pages, affiliate websites, in mobile apps, etc. Google runs the web’s most dominant ad network through which publishers can sign up to display ads.
It is All About Clicks
The most important thing for both advertisers and consumers to know about PPC advertising is that it is built on the principle of clicks. Advertisers bid on certain keywords they want associated with their ads. Then they design and submit their ads to a major publisher like Microsoft, Facebook, or Google. The publisher then distributes the ads through its ad network. Please click for more info: Jio Rockers Kannada
Ads are displayed based on user activity and keywords. If an ad is displayed but not clicked, the advertiser is not charged. Charges only apply when ads are clicked. Here’s the thing – advertisers are charged even when clicks come from people who have no intention of actually buying anything.
Clicking Ads Doesn’t Show Support
Knowing how the PPC model works, it should be clear that merely clicking on ads doesn’t show support. If 100 friends and family members all clicked on an advertiser’s ad but never even stuck around long enough to consider buying something, what would have been accomplished? Very little.
The advertiser will see that his ad got quite a bit of action through all those clicks. But as he analyzes all his data, he soon realizes that none of the clicks led to a single sale. All that ad money was flushed down the drain.
Users who click ads merely to show their support are not doing so with malicious intent. In fact, their intentions are good and noble. They believe that what they are doing helps advertisers. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Every click means a charge against the advertiser’s marketing budget. If clicks are not leading to sales, money is being spent for nothing.
The Click Fraud Problem
Generating ad clicks with no intention to buy is known in the industry as click fraud. Technically, people who merely click ads to show support are still perpetrating click fraud if they have no intention of becoming paying customers. But again, they are not doing it with malicious intent.
On the other hand, there are bad actors who do perpetrate click fraud maliciously. They tend to be rogue publishers who purposely design their publishing platforms to maximize clicks so as to drive revenue. Fraud Blocker, the makers of one of the industry’s leading Google click fraud prevention software products, says scammers can use click bots or click farms to maximize the number of clicks they can accomplish.
Driving revenue through fake clicks is a multibillion dollar industry. Tens of billions of dollars are lost to it every year. Unfortunately, well-intentioned people who click on ads to support their favorite advertisers only contribute to the losses.
Next time you are asked to show your support for an organization by clicking on its ads, think twice. If you already know you don’t intend to become a paying customer, clicking doesn’t help. In fact, it could be harming the advertiser you are trying to support. A better way to show support is to actually buy something.
