People, please stop funding web-crime!

Someone, they are nameless, are paying unscrupulous companies to advertise their products. They may not even know these companies are unscrupulous.

Here is the short tip version:

DO NOT PAY ANYONE FOR HITS!

Hits on your website do not equate to customers or even often remotely interested parties. There seems to be an entire industry built around taking money from people who equate hits on their site to customer awareness or product sales.

Let me explain paitiently.

There is a massive number of ways in which a person may attract "hits" to their website. Howeve, the only quality hit is the hit from a person who has arrived at your site in search of a service or product you are offering. This type of hit is very hard to get because of the MILLIONS of companies out there being PAID by third parties to get ANY kinds of hits to their customers sites (customers who may infact by dying for your services are being redirected to a million sites with people offering them nothing they want). Unscrupulous advertisers are very successfull in this ends. These sites get millions on millions of people directed to them because they are conned, fooled, tricked and otherwise mislead into arriving at these sites. The action of a person thus, conned, fooled, tricked is (in 99% of cases I susspect) to immidiately leave the site and try to find what they ACTUALLY where looking for.

Now, some people paying for web-advertising are slightly better informed, they realise that 'How long a person views your page is an indication of interest' and ask for only these hits to be counted (since this is a measure which can be taken). However, again, unscrupulous companies have this covered! They simply trick the web-public into clicking their advert but avoid the user actually realising they are viewing the advert to it appears they viewed it for a long time (because they either didn't notice it was there or the window appeared under other windows). The customer may be shown a quite "compelling" legitimate" advertisement for their product to add to the fraud.

So, therefore, the length of time each "clicker" spent viewing your page becomes a nonsense as well.

So, stop paying for clicks!

Pay for results! Google has a reasonably solid system to ensure you get quality clicks. However, watch out, because a number of third party companies re-selling Google services can easily warp this system by "trickyly" created pages.

I recommend that whenever you enter into a contract with a company for web advertising, that you contractually only pay them based on the sales comming directly through their advertising program, proven ideally by individual customer acknowledgement or sufficiently by unique ID references placed in the advertising campaign.

If you do go with a clicks only advertiser, should you be lucky enough to get sales from the campaign, you are still hurting your company image over because as millions of misdirected people may see your company as "unscrupulous" as well (since the trick lead them to your company name).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PEOPLE STOP PAYING FOR CLICKS.. PAY FOR RESULTS.

As my final note, its interesting that this kind of "commerical activity" is entirely LEGAL. I also feel the law should be updated to make "misleading" online an offence against the law.