Click Fraud and Attorney and Law Firm Internet Marketing
Kevin O'Keefe raises an interesting problem for lawyers who use Adsense or some other, form of internet advertising in his short note,
Click fraud over 20% on lawyers sponsored links
Lawyers buy as many, if not more, sponsored links on Google and Yahoo as any other group. The sponsored links appear when someone does a relevant search, i.e., Yakima injury lawyer, and the lawyer pays the search engine for each click on their link. Good deal, except over 20% of the clicks are from 'clickers,' human or automated computer program, who have no actual interest in the lawyer's services.
Kevin concludes by saying: "Though Google claims the numbers are lower, a good portion of what you pay as a lawyer for sponsored links goes for click fraud.
Just another reason to use the Internet for word of mouth networking and organic search engine results."
I disagree with the conclusion, there are a number of different ways to address click fraud. First, if you are advertising on the internet as Law Firm, if you don't have a landing page designed to convert interest into action, then it makes no sense to have an ad campaign that is pay for per click, or PPC.
Most if not all legal sites that I have visited do not have a landing page, a page designed to convert interest into sales. By their nature, most legal firms are not going to have such a page. Without an effective landing page there is no point in paying for each visit.
The better marketing strategy would be to use a cost per impression campaign, or CPM, basically billboards for the internet.
In a CPM campaign, you pay for the number of times that your ad is shown, whether or not any action is taken by viewer. You are trying to build brand awareness this way. The general problem with a CPM campaign is trying to judge its effectiveness. You aren't sure if people are visiting your site because of the campaign or despite it.
Adsense will allow you to construct a PPC or CPM ad campaign. One neat way to avoid PPC fraud and achieve a very cheap CPM campaign, is to construct a PPC campaign over the content network, using extremely low bids on popular and relevant search keywords that are also written about. Your ads will then appear on those websites discussing the keywords, but will never appear if someone is Google searching for those keywords. You will still be open to click fraud, but you will have minimized the cost. Since your bids are so low, you can get a lot of impressions on the content networks for very little money.
