The Google Conspiracy

I recently had a conversation with a fellow webmaster and former AdWords advertiser. When I asked why he had stopped advertising, he gave me a rough rundown on how he wasn't getting results, and that he started to see a drop in conversions vs. money spent.

It was at this point in the conversation that the inevitable happened:

He figures it was attributed to either Google themselves generating clicks that looked to be from anywhere in the world, or it was known bad traffic that Google just ignored.

*eye roll*

I always wondered why people had these harebrained ideas about Google, and how they don't care if you get ripped off. It just never made sense.

There is the easy parallel to draw to the antivirus industry. Sure, they want to do just a good enough job to make you think they care, but not such a good job that they catch 100% of the malware because why would you buy updates in the future? ZDNet had reported the 80% of malware makes it past most AV's, but what if we saw click fraud rates that high? It would definitely make the bullshit Click Fraud Index look like a Strawberry Shortcake party on your AdWords account wouldn't it!

Then the next inevitable argument line is how Google has little transparency on how they handle this problem, so how do you REALLY know. But again, neither does the AV industry. We can only assume (or you can in theory reverse engineer their software, which you can't with Google) that they are doing everything in their power to protect your corporate and personal networks. But they fail, and they fail big.

Yet everyone keeps buying it.

Hopefully we can start to be the ones to put an end to this madness. Drop the Google conspiracy, and start paying attention to your website. Guard your PPC like you guard your network.