Pay-per-click marketing tends to be a love it or hate it platform. On the love it side, the platform is a way to generate traffic to a site immediately. This, of course, allows you to first figure out if anyone is interested in what you are selling and then figure out if your site can convert their interest into revenues.

On the downside, it costs money per click, which means you need to keep an eye on whether you are spending more than you make. Then there is the issue of click fraud. Nobody really knows how bad a problem it is, but most people agree it IS a problem. The people at Google and Yahoo deny this, but who really believes them considering they make money on the fraud?

One of the interesting things about PPC is the bidding process. In the old days, GoTo was the big boy on the market. It later became Overture, which was purchased by Yahoo. The system was great. You could bid an exact amount for placement on the engine. This, in turn, made it easy to figure out where your ads would be placed, how much the cost would be and so on.

Then along came Adwords from our friends at Google. Suddenly, you were bidding by range instead of a specific amount. Nobody was really sure where the ads were going to appear, but most people trusted Google at that time and click fraud had not reared its ugly head to any great extent. Ah, but that was then and this is now.

Click fraud is garnering more and more attention on a weekly basis. Just how many of the clicks are legitimate and how many are fakes? Some estimate twenty percent. Some believe the figure is higher while others believe it is lower. The point is nobody really knows. Regardless, the PPC platforms have received a ton of criticism and rightly so in my opinion.

Facing up to the criticism, Google and Yahoo/Overture promised to institute click fraud prevention strategies. Supposedly this has happened. At the same time, however, both maintain the range bidding process. There is nothing wrong with it per se, but it hardly brings more exacting information to the PPC process.

If click fraud is not an issue as claimed by Google and Yahoo, why do they continue to evolve their systems towards providing less specific information? Could they be hiding something? Perhaps making it near impossible for any lawyers or the Justice Department to decipher what is going on?

Beats me. With all the criticism, one would expect them to provide more detailed information and provide proof of the steps they are taking to prevent click fraud. If anything, they are doing just the opposite. At least that is my opinion.