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[F384]Fixing A Broken Marriage

by Jay Stockwell, Jay

If someone breaks a window in a building, and it isn't fixed quickly, others will soon be broken. As the evidence of neglect builds, vandals will be more emboldened to break into the building and commit more vandalism and eventually destroy it completely.

If, on the other hand, that window is promptly fixed, it discourages further crime because it is clear that someone is watching the store.

Further, if instead of just fixing the window, you find the vandal and hold them accountable for it, a message goes out loud and clear: we're watching and you will get caught.

The problem with the broken windows theory is that it requires more than police action to put into practice. If the community isn't involved in the cleanup effort, the initiative fails. When the community is drawn in to help police the problems, to report them and to 'mind the store', so to speak, crime rates drop.

This theory can be extended to police nearly any venue where there is unacceptable behavior - including the problem of click fraud in the venue of PPC advertising. At the moment, the PPC industry is like a vacant building with nobody watching the store. It's easy to enter fraudulent clicks. It's even easier to get away with it. At the moment, a large percentage of advertisers leave the detection of fraudulent clicks up to the PPC provider - and the policy of most PPC providers is that they will provide refunds for proven click fraud upon request from the advertiser.

What happens when:

- The PPC provider's software detection methods don't catch the click fraud?
- The advertiser doesn't use fraud detection software?
- The advertiser can't back up the claim of click fraud?
- The major players in the industry refer to the problem as 'negligible'?

Simply put - the click fraudster gets away with it. The rewards are enormous - estimates put the amount of money lost to click fraud in the range of billions of dollars annually. But the loss to any individual advertiser is usually negligible, and even Google sees refunding money to advertisers as no more than the cost of doing business.

If we're ever going to put a dent in click fraud, three things have to happen.

1. Advertisers have to take responsibility for monitoring their own campaigns. If you don't know it's happening, you can't take steps to stop it.

2. Advertisers need to use the information they generate through their analytics to demand refunds from the PPC companies on a consistent basis. As long as the losses are minor compared to the profits for the PPC companies, their incentive for responding is limited.

3. Click fraud perpetrators have to be identified, actively pursued and penalized. Currently, modern techniques that use proxies and 'zombie networks' can make it almost impossible to identify and punish offenders.

Those are the three elements of the Broken Window theory that make it work - community action, official backing and action and penalizing perpetrators.

The first element in combating click fraud as a community is in getting click fraud prevention and tracking software into the hands of all advertisers. The difficulty of sifting through hundreds of pages of data to make comparisons and weed out patterns that signal click fraud is a daunting one for most companies.

Click fraud detection software makes it almost painless - but can be expensive. Other parts of the internet market have benefited from open sourcing of software to manage content, manipulate graphics, and create communities and process payments. An open offering of free click fraud prevention software will encourage advertisers to start monitoring their own logs and records and identify potential fraudulent clicks.

In addition, an open offering encourages others to modify and extend the software and make those extensions available to the community at large.

With those monitors in place, the second part of the equation becomes more possible. When it's easy for advertisers to identify and document fraudulent clicks on their campaigns, it becomes that much easier for them to demand refunds for those clicks. The third part is an outgrowth of creating a community that actively works to eliminate click fraud.

For the time being, click fraudsters are loose in a neighborhood of broken windows. With the right tools, we can begin to repair the windows and create a community that makes it nearly impossible to get away with their tactics.

Yet few of these businesses know how to treat a broken business (or strategy) model innovation process. With these questions, you'll have just the first aid you need to recover from broken processes. Then, you can return your business to health and prosperity.

These questions will help you discover better ways to improve your business strategy model. By using these questions, you should get a better sense of how well developed your business (strategy) model is now compared to the needs of having a large competitive advantage. Understanding those dimensions will give you another helpful perspective on what is good about and what needs to be improved concerning your business (strategy) model development process.

Where has your business (strategy) model created competitive advantages in serving customers?

If you are like most companies, you will find that the strategy model has helped you more with some customers than with others. In fact, a typical company will find that more than 80 percent of its customers get relatively few advantages versus what competitors provide from the company's strategic model. Thinking about your strategic business model in this way will help you get a better feel for where you can use strategic model innovation to make greater progress.

Where has your strategy model created competitive disadvantages in serving customers?

Whenever a company focuses, one of the purposes of a strategy model, it also chooses to meet the needs of some current and potential customers less well. Sometimes these disadvantages for those customers are unavoidable, but many times they are the result of an oversight or limited thinking. Being aware of who is disfavored in what ways can often stimulate improved business models that enable a company to instead gain advantages with some of these potential and current customers.

What were the original reasons for creating these advantages and disadvantages?

Many times, a srategy model choice fit the current and expected business environment well. But permanently changed conditions can often make such choices inappropriate. A business model innovation process needs to be effective in creating business models that will work well in a broad range of business environments, as well as directing work on creating better strategy models when circumstances change in unanticipated ways that require a response.

Are those reasons for favoring this strategic business model still the most compelling ones?

If they are not, you should also think about when changes took place that required a response. The next question follows on to make sense of this observation.

If your company did not make innovations in a timely way to the strategic model, what were the most probable causes of the delay?

You should separate out the issue of not noticing the changed circumstances, from wishful thinking that the new conditions will go away, from not focusing on the strategy model, from not having the skills or resources to work on a new business model.

If you had adopted the ideal strategic model for the time when your current business model was set, what would you have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?

The idea here is to determine if there are any gaps in your strategy model that should have been filled in the past. In most cases, major gaps have been present for a long time. This will help stimulate the focus of your current innovation activities.

How would your business model development process have needed to change in order to have created a more ideal strategy model last time?

Generally, the problems will lie in the area of having too few people thinking about the strategic model, running too few business model improvement experiments, not involving enough people in identifying stakeholder issues, insufficient consideration of different business environments, not preparing those enough who worked on the new business model, and too infrequent business model reevaluations. However, please do feel free to add your own thoughts about weaknesses. This list is just here to help start your thinking.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Article Source : Pg. 355

About Author

Both Jay Stockwell & Donald Mitchell are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Jay Stockwell has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet. Jay Stockwell has been fighting click fraud since 1999. In 2004 he developed the first version of Click Sentinel which was released 6 months later to critical acclaim. His release of. Jay Stockwell's top article generates over 480 views. to your Favourites.

Donald Mitchell has sinced written about articles on various topics from Education, Insurance and Internet Marketing. Donald Mitchell is chairman and CEO of Mitchell and Company, a strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You. Donald Mitchell's top article generates over 33100 views. to your Favourites.