It's Positively Click Fraud; DoublePositive Marketing Group uses ClickTracks to Net $9K Credit.

DoublePositive (www.doublepositive.com) is a leader in connecting interested, qualified consumers with businesses and sales representatives. DoublePositive uses proprietary phone technology and web-based applications to deliver sales leads—such as qualified mortgage leads—to companies in real time.

Like many businesses, DoublePositive was spending thousands of dollars every month on pay-per-click advertising. But something was bothering Senior VP of Operations Dianne Conley—she was certain that there was something fishy with some of the paid clicks, but had no way to prove it.

At $4-6 Per Keyword, Click Fraud can Cost Big Bucks
"In an industry like ours, we're competing for some of the most expensive keywords on the web," noted Dianne, "With a budget of around $25K a month, and keyword phrases costing anywhere from $4-6 per click, it's easy to see how huge of an impact even just a handful of fraudulent clicks could have. We were using WebTrends for our web analytics, but it wasn't giving us the info we needed with regards to click fraud. I started looking for a click fraud-specific solution and found ClickTracks."

Evidence of Click Fraud Leads to Credit
Using ClickTracks Pro's Click Fraud report, the DoublePositive team first decided to scrutinize two months' worth of data: June and July, 2006. And what they found confirmed their hunches—click fraud was most likely occurring. One glance at the Click Fraud report showed two main areas of concern; In general, conversion rates were plummeting even though PPC spend was increasing. Specifically, their campaigns were receiving clicks from many different foreign countries, even though their campaigns were only set to run in the United States.

With data from the Click Fraud report in hand, DoublePositive's Senior Data Analyst, Tim Watts submitted the company's click fraud refund request to Yahoo in mid-August. And the result? "By mid-September, we were notified that we would be issued a credit," said Tim. "Shortly thereafter, a credit for nearly $9K arrived. The whole process was quite easy and straightforward. I was pleasantly surprised."

"Our Time is Better Spent Creating PPC Campaigns...Not Researching Click Fraud"
The DoublePositive team now uses ClickTracks' Click Fraud report to regularly monitor their pay-per-click campaign performance. "What it comes down to is the fact that our time is better spent creating and monitoring our PPC advertising campaigns—not researching potential cases of click fraud. Using ClickTracks to help us detect click fraud is the most effective, efficient way to make sure our advertising is getting the best ROI," said DoublePositive's VP of Marketing Chris Beauchamp. Chris also mentioned that the company has completely replaced their old web analytics software with ClickTracks.

So what can other companies learn from DoublePositive's experience? "To start—many companies erroneously believe that click fraud will just jump out at you—all the sudden you'll see a sharp rise in clicks coming from an overseas "click farm"—and that's just not a reality. Click fraud is usually much more subtle and harder to identify," said Chris.

Lastly, Chris also stresses the value of being patient and watching for patterns. "Click fraud happens over time—not in an instant. Using a log-file based web analytics package like ClickTracks lets us go back in time and compare historic behavior to current behavior."

DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc. was founded in late 2004 with the specific purpose of bridging the 'last mile' of converting traditional (data-only) leads into sales. They specialize in the live Hot Transfer of mortgage leads, insurance leads, educations leads, automotive leads, real estate leas and debt leads. DoublePositive is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland's high tech waterfront office complex, Tide Point. For more information visit, www.DoublePositive.com.