Sunday, July 26, 2009

Is this click fraud for Cubics.com traffic?

So i recently came across a new social network advertising company called http://www.cubics.com/

Buy Targeted Ads on Social NetworksCubics is the first and only advertising network that allows advertisers to target users of social networks such as FacebookTM, MySpaceTM, Friendster & Bebo.
So I bought a 'test' amount of pre-paid credits to run some banner ads for one of the Live Fan Chat website http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com


Basically they look like this;

http://www.livebaseballchat.com/
Chat live now with other baseball
fans this weekend during the games



Pretty straight forward and uses the same text we use for our google text ads. We've tried a few different variations and generally get a few clicks each and every day at a very dependable rate (it's a pretty niche target market + we have a very small limit set for our daily budget).
So for the first few days with Cubics it looked like we were getting the same reliable click through numbers each day and looked like our $20 test investment would last about a week, until today.

I just got an email a few hours ago saying my account had been depleted and i needed to add more credits or the campaign will be cancelled.

So i logged into the account to find;

Date 2009-07-26
Views 223,848
Clicks 198
Conv 0.088%
Total Cost $34.47
CPC Bid $0.20

At first i was like way cool - 198 clicks in one day.

Then when I realised every single visitor only visited 1 page and then logged off in less than 10 seconds.

Then when i checked google analytics I found out all of the visits occurred within a 1 hour period...... (9pm est).



hmmmm -

Does http://www.cubics.com/ have a problem with click fraud or were they just very lucky displaying my advertisement to 198 people who clicked on then left without clicking any links onto other pages all in a 1 hour period.

So what do you think? click fraud or not?


Cheers,
Dean

1 comment:

  1. BTW the update was Cubics refunded my money but refused to tell me which site the ads were displayed on.

    not sure about how i feel moving forward.

    ReplyDelete