In an earlier thread, I brought up the issue of wrongly directed clicks. Azoogle has responded (congrats for a speedy response), but they informed me that garbage clicks are a part of life and there is nothing to be done about it. About 2% of my Azoogle clicks are routinely wrongly directed. Which means that 2% of my AdWords expense goes down the toilet. I find this disturbing. Should I learn to live with it? Is 2% a better figure than other affiliate programs?
yeah.. i generally see like 40 or so clicks every night after midnight reporting on some offer that i'm not even promoting appearing, probably international offer for free stuff... generates only .50 a click or less but always funny to see those report every night. assuming people just click happy and garbage clicks
flip, Believe it or not, even if you are targeting your campaigns on AdWords to US only areas, that doesn't mean that google won't get international clicks on those campaigns. You don't always get charged for all of the clicks generated by your adsense account, and rather than letting those clicks go through to the advertiser and you making NOTHING from those clicks, we try to redirect them somewhere where you CAN make some money. This has actually been discussed in the past here, and even if you talk to Google, they will tell you that your US ONLY targetted campaigns WILL generate international clicks. Alex
^ theres been plenty of times where all of my visitors were redirected. Look at the Blockbuster thread below...
Um... It's part of the life of the game. Why not just redirect internation traffic to an adsense filled content page? At least you're going to make back some of your cost that way.
Not only do you have to live with this, you will also lose clicks due to click fraud, good clicks that aren't tracked, conversions that aren't tracked, and so on. This is with any PPC and affiliate network. Its just the nature of the Internet, it's a very error prone and lossy system. You should probabaly assume 20% of your expenditures will be lost in some way...
Yep and this is why you should track all clicks you pay for and get refunds for your intl visitors even though you are targeting Us (from G or Y etc.. not AZ)
perhaps it would be a good idea to give affiliates the option to have redirects go to their own websites. For example instead of an international visitor going from azoogleads blockbuster to azoogleads smileys, they get redirected from azoogleads blockbuster to the affiliates movie related page. Maybe something to look towards in the future.
That's an awesome idea, I'm hoping that Mr alex might be able to get something worked out like that. I'm geting killed with the smileys.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm going ask the team in charge of the Blockbuster account to remove all of the international redirects. This way, ALL traffic will flow to the offer page and there won't be any mis-directed clicks. Hope that helps! -Joe