I finally figured out where all of these Junk Clicks have been coming from! Gooogle Adwords, please accept my humble apology … you were innocent!
In fact, these garbage clicks were coming from the Adbrite ad network.
I initially signed up for Adbrite as an advertiser, because there are some good webmaster and SEO blogs which are Adbrite publishers. As you finish the signup process with Adbrite, they innocently pose the question ‘would you like your ads to run across our network of sites?’.
“Sure I would!”, I thought. Overall, the Google content adnetwork (via Adsense) has been a trusted source of leads in the past … and advertising across Adbrite’s wide network of sites could only expand the reach of our ads, right?
From my experience, I consider the Adbrite content network ads as ‘junk clicks’ for 3 reasons.
- Adbrite syndicates ads via the Kontera ContentLink system. As I mentioned in a previous post – this leads to some very confused / low quality clicks.
- The quality of sites allowed seems very low quality. These sites included 2kdown.com badongo.net btbbt.biz mimima.com websamba.com, at an average of $.13 per click! Other Adbrite content sites include megaupload.com rapidshare.de. These are mainly free hosting and free file upload sites.
- There is no option to block ads on certain sites. Atleast with Google’s content network … when you see a click from a site you think is of low value, you can quickly block it. There’s no option like this for Adbrite.
Here’s another very informative blog posting, where the author describes a similar bad experience with adbrite PPC network ads.
