Still plugging away

Just thought I'd let you know that I am still out there plugging away for you, my loyal reader. My latest research project is to establish blogs at other places and link back to myself. I am trying to see if there's any truth to the whole "the more links you have, the more traffic you'll get". This effort hasn't seemed to have had any effect so far. Here's a little tidbit on Google Adwords. Earlier this week, I discontinued my ad campaign at Adwords. There has definitely been a drop off in traffic, but it wasn't like the traffic I was getting from my ad campaign was helping at all. I have no hard information to base this on, but here are my observations. A Almost since I started blogging, I had a statcounter on my blog. I checked my statcounter several times a day and I could never match the hits I saw on my counter and the clicks that Google recorded. I sent the following email to Google: How is it that I see that my ad has been clicked on 7 times in one day, yet neither of the 2 hit trackers I have on my web page have recorded the visits? Take today for example, Adwords shows that I have 2 clicks from searches and 5 clicks from content. Making a total of 7 clicks which I was charged $1.26. However, both my hit counters have only registered 4 visitors for today and no of them have come from Google adwords. Here is an excerpt from Google's response: Additionally, Google's reporting technology may record clicks that other web tracking programs may miss. Some tracking programs may not register clicks that occur while the destination site is down, or they may have limitations on the kinds and sources of clicks that they detect. Of the 255 clicks I was charged for on Adwords, I could only account for 210 on my statcounter. Additionally, none of the clicks ever loaded more than one page. In fact, the none of the "visitors" ever stayed long enough to record a length of stay greater than zero seconds - not a single one. One of my subscriptions is for the Interactive Advertising Bureau newsletter. A short time ago they had an article that stated one advertiser hired an outside auditor look into the quality of clicks from Adwords. Guess what - the auditor determined that 30% of the clicks were fraudulent - 30%! The estimated that 15% of the clicks at Yahoo! were fraudulent. You may be aware, Blogger is owned by Google and it is one of the only blog sites that allows the automated set up of blogs. You know, all the blogs you see that have nonsense formatted like paragraphs are up for bots to go through and "click" on ads. Question is - what do we want to do about it? Personally, I decided to give up on Adwords. I am close to giving up on Blogger. Technorati Tags: Fiction, Online Book, Chapter, Rebeleyeball, Paul Gavin IceRocket Tags: Fiction, Blook, Chapter, rebeleyeball More stories from Paul Gavin. Info on novels Paul Gavin's Storefront. Copyright (c) 2006 Paul Gavin. All rights reserved.