The PPC and AdSense Book

The line of demarcation between what is and is not cheating Google is quite similar to the law of tax evasion vs tax avoidance.

One will land you in a very deep mound of mud, while the other will build you a gold castle.

So it is with the all-powerful Google AdSense. 

Whether you like it or not, it brought in a whopping $9 billion last year!

Without a question, AdSense is the most successful PPC advertising operation in history. 

With such vast income available, scammers and fraudsters abound, hiding around every corner, developing ways to steal a piece of the AdSense phenomenon itself. 

They certainly do.

 Last year, to the tune of roughly a billion dollars. Some are large corporations operating complex software across servers with falsified IP addresses, while others are groups of students looking to make a little extra cash from their website.

You've probably heard of the recent'most foolish guy of the century.' Who created this undetected clicking bot that would browse through Google advertising all day? If it had been released onto the internet, it may have ruined Google. 

Can you image thousands, if not millions, of people visiting your site every day and clicking on ads for 10 cents? AdSense and its billions of dollars would have died overnight.

The guy could have kept quiet and spent the rest of his life in the lap of luxury, picking out invisible crumbs from a multibillion-dollar cake. But what exactly does he do? Google offers or threatens to buy the program for $100,000.

 When they refused, he attempted to sell it on the Internet for $10,000 per copy. When he was arrested, he lost everything. Good.

Even as you read this, there are thousands of people who are running some form of PPC scam and thousands more who are fantasizing about doing so.

 Those of you who are should be altering methods on a daily basis, much like Google.

 For anyone considering it, consider this a warning about the perils that await you. Do not attempt it.

For those considering making a legitimate future income through AdSense. Continue reading because this will be an eye opener for you, and you will subsequently learn how to create that golden mansion from AdSense. Or, at the very least, a good little honest earner.

PPC's defense system.

To begin, the IP address is the most powerful tool in the click fraud armory. Everyone connected to the internet has one. You leave a trace route every time you visit a page.

 This is also one of the most effective marketing techniques for PPC companies such as Google. 

They use it to categorize visitors into geographic places so that they can deliver relevant local information and advertisements. 

As a result, they automatically know the IP address of every single click on an AdSense ad. 

As a result, if you click on one of your own ads from the same IP address that was recorded with Google when the account was created, you will be detected by Google.

 If it happens again, you may receive a warning or potentially lose your account and everything within it.

The smaller click scams account for the vast majority of the usual 10% loss in PPC. A student convinces several friends with different IP addresses to visit his website and click a few ads.

 If he is astute and they only click two ads each time they visit, never twice in a day, the chances of detection are close to none. 

Particularly if they act like a real surfer and browse a few pages on the advertiser's website. But at 10 cents every click, isn't that not a lot? These individuals, on the other hand, are astute. 

They make use of an established site with high keyword value content. As an example, consider loans.

 Some of these AdSense clicks are worth more than 10 cents each! There are some that, in theory, are worth $50 each click. 

However, regardless of what Google charges the advertiser, they have a publisher cut off at about $15 per single ad click. 

If there are twenty students who are all friends, and the site is a page rank 5 student site with $10 ads, forty clicks each day equals $400!! Now, $20 per day is not a lot of money, but it can be quite useful to a student. 

Assume they each have their own website and conduct AdSense or other PPC ads. Are they making a fortune?

Yes. At least for a little while. 

However, their master PPC click fraud strategy has a major drawback. They must all live in the same neighborhood or surrounding area because they are all friends.

 There are suddenly these sites that, according to Google's vast database, have no local geographic interest but receive a large number of visitors from the same location.

 Google is aware of this since the primary service provider, through which everyone ultimately flows, has its own IP address on the internet.

So, yes, the click fraud method works on a small scale, but it will not make you rich from a handful of clicks a day on your friend's site.

Other factors, as well as a myth or two, will catch out all but the most cunning of the larger click cheaters.

Cookies: There have been reports that Google uses cookies in its AdSense PPC adverts. 

Cookies would be a logistical nightmare that might yield very little precise information because many have cookies set to off and others across the many browsers have their own settings.

 Why would I need cookies to get such information if I already know your specific IP address and, with it, your geographically actual address? Not to mention that they are likely to know not only the IP address, but also the MAC address of the modem and router at that IP address.

However, if you click the PPC link every five minutes, the advertiser may use an identification cookie and will rapidly learn about you.

With the ultimate strength of Google Search, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, GMail, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Sitemaps, Blogger, and so on and so forth,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Google can identify the vast majority of users worldwide, and somewhere in those gigantic databases humming away in air cooled oil, they know every single click from every single one of those people. Every single second of the day. It's the CIA's fantasy. 

Unless you can spoof IP addresses on a large scale or make it appear that millions of clicks are coming from unique IP addresses in geographically disparate regions. You've been busted.

Infection of PCs with a Trojan virus that sits quietly in the background automatically clicking a set of PPC adverts sent up by some software on a server or group of servers has been the only system that has been successful in this field.

Then there are the clickers from the far east. They will cheerfully sit and click on anything for a dollar all day.

The clicking sweat shops have taken over China's sweat shops. 

Hundreds of people working on computers in a small, poorly ventilated room, all smoking on cigarettes and spilling rice on the keyboard.

They click on PPC advertising to order or play online community games, amassing gold and selling it in the real world for hard cash.

There are millions to be made on the internet by unscrupulous sweat factory operators at a dollar a day laborers. 

Some of the slightly more respectable ones range from writing articles to adding website content. 

However, any sort of PPC creates an obvious avenue for massive profit. 

Many of these click frauds were effectively eliminated by banning IP addresses from specific places.

 Though new sweatshops are growing up all over the place, not just in the Far East, but even in Europe, with illegal immigrants in London laboring for £10 per day on only four hours of sleep. 

Maybe a lot more than a dollar a day, but the market is massive, worth billions of dollars, and the rewards for underworld operations are expanding accordingly.

Then there are the imprints or patterns of someone who has visited your site. 

Why do they simply visit the same home page and, in a matter of seconds, click on all of the PPC advertisements before rapidly exiting the site? But why don't they click on advertising on other websites they visit? That is a really obvious footprint. 

Let's see, this IP address has clicked on dozens of AdSense adverts on a single publisher's website. 

With a click through rate (CTR) close to 100%. 

Remember that it is not simply Google that will be looking at the clicks from your site; the advertiser has full access to all of that information as well as good analysis software. 

They can effectively measure the cost effectiveness of their AdSense campaign this way. 

If they observe hundreds of clicks per day from the same IP address and no conversion to a sale, they will yell at Google, and they will yell loudly if those hits cost them money. 

Who will politely unplug you. Forever!

I mentioned CTR earlier. This is something that many click fraudsters overlook, often to their detriment.

CTR is a straightforward statistic that divides the number of page impressions received by your visitors by the number of Google adverts clicked on.

It is pretty normal to observe extremely high clicks on Google ads if a site is very specialized and vertically targeted.

 If a site concerning Fender guitars contains AdSense advertisements, the advertisers will be associated to that industry, and up to 20% of visitors may click on an ad. 

Google is aware of the precise nature of the site because it is sending tailored PPC advertising to those users. 

As a result, rather than flagging the site for probable click fraud owing to abnormally high CTR, they deliver higher value AdSense advertisements to that site because to the high CTR and vertical content. 

As a result of the AdSense earnings, the site owner may have developed a pleasant little supplemental income or perhaps a golden palace.

 However, this is not the norm, with most sites having a CTR of under 3%.

So, if your site is about something of minor importance to the internet, ranked somewhere in the middle of millions of other pages and not even indexed by Google yet, has no back links, and has a CTR of 50%, it will be immediately flagged, and unless there's a good reason, the jolly old plug will be pulled again.

A CTR of 1% to 7% is considered normal and should not raise any red flags. However, if your friends are the only ones who visit your site and each one clicks an ad every time, that's a 100% CTR!! You've been apprehended, and your plug has been firmly pulled.

That only leaves the hard core of the more cunning, but small-time click fraudsters who continuously milk the system. 

They are virtually undetectable and impossible to distinguish from legitimate AdSense clicks. 

This accounts for the majority of the 10%, and as in other businesses, as long as losses are kept to an acceptable 10%, everyone is pleased. 

Credit card rates are roughly 12%, and most traders now utilize a 10%-15% loss adjustment. 

So, despite all of the hype about the demise of PPC ads due to click fraud, plain business logic says that below a certain value, the cost of further improvement is detrimental to the bottom line - profit.

Overall, advertisers are pleased with what they regard as an acceptable loss in a tremendously profitable and growing market.

tremendously profitable and growing market. Because of Google's massive size and powerful analytic capabilities, which are continually being developed, advertisers feel protected from large-scale click fraud and know they are entering a very successful sector with Google AdSense and, to a lesser extent, other PPC campaigns.

In AdSense, click fraud is the equivalent of tax evasion, and you deserve to lose your account. However, there are more legitimate ways to obtain anything from a few crumbs to a beautiful slice of AdSense cake. 

While some of it may be considered a "grey area" by hardened old timers, it is a legal and respectable means of reaching enormous success. 

Similar to the tax avoidance rather than evasion scenario. Instead of gaming the system, you collaborate with it and explore its numerous "grey" zones.

The biggest profits (and hazards) in this environment are closer to that delicate line between correctness and legality. 

Accountants take advantage of it, and multinational corporations use it to acquire vast fortunes. 

Consider the famous example of Microsoft. All those years ago, Bill and his buddy were sweating under the weight of a contract with IBM that required them to use software they didn't have! If something went wrong and the miracle didn't happen, they'd be in jail for deceiving IBM. 

Ouch! But, at the last minute, they discovered a genius who had created this magical DOS application. 

They paid a huge sum for it, which not only saved their bacon but also made Bill the richest man on the planet! But look at the rewards, that's what I call a close call. It's a shame it was the only Microsoft software that ever functioned reliably, and it's still the only thing they didn't create. LOL.

If you want to make real and honest money from AdSense or any PPC campaign, I hope the following chapters are helpful.

The first step is to compare AdSense industry Gurus who make monthly AdSense cheques in the thousands of dollars to others that make only a few dollars. The second step is to understand where they succeed or fail. 

When that information is combined with strong SEO work, anyone can have a site at the top of Google, ahead of millions of other pages.

Once there, all that remains is to replicate the success with another site, and so on. Within a year and an average amount of work, and if you are determined to making it work, you might be earning anywhere from $1000 to $10,000 per month through AdSense.

 As a result, in addition to Google AdSense, you should be conducting promotions or other affiliate ad campaigns on such sites, which should make 10 times as much as AdSense if your audience is vertical enough. 

While AdSense may contribute significantly to your revenue, affiliate advertising provide substantially bigger single sale values. 

But beware: it won't be long before Google develops in-house affiliate advertising to supplement AdSense, or buys out someone like Commission Junction.

Within an industry that has the potential to reach outer space year after year, Internet advertising is on its way to becoming the world's largest earner, earning hundreds of billions of dollars every year with no end in sight. 

The beauty of the Internet, thanks in large part to the two geniuses behind Google, is that everyone can be anyone they want to be.

 There is no worldwide David vs Goliath. David's site can rank higher, look better, and be more enticing than Goliath's with some decent input, and it almost always does. 

That means that anyone with a desire can have a piece of this enormous cake; all it takes is common sense, a willingness to learn, and a desire to earn a living from the internet. 

You will need to be familiar with programs such as Dreamweaver and PHP, but it is not rocket science.

The author's.com site KeywordAccess has a continuation of the 'PPC Book.' Along with articles on PPC, white, black, and grey sites, keywords, and other interesting topics, you'll also have free access to over 15 million keywords and phrases to help you build that profitable site.