Don't Get Scammed From Online Camera Stores

The Wise Bread blog has a post entry titled "DO NOT buy a digital camera online until you read this". The post is a detailed account of exactly what happened when he tried to purchase a digital camera from one of the most notorious online camera stores, Bestpricecameras.com.

The usual way these Brooklyn-based online camera stores scam you is the simple Bait-and-Switch tactic. They lure you to make a purchase by showing cameras that are well below the prices you see elsewhere (as much as half as much). That's the bait. Then, once you place an order, you'll get a call or an e-mail saying that your order is backordered or you find out it's for the camera body only (no battery, manual, box, or anything else) and you'll get pressured to purchase a bunch of different stuff (or a different model of camera).

In a previous post, I talk about how I look for these scam stores advertising on ProductCritic via Google Adwords. The only way to ensure that the visitors on your site don't go to one of these scam stores is to block those ads from your site.

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Google's Doing Something About MFA Sites. Finally!

As I've written about before, I hate MFA sites! They are such huge leeches on the Internet but I certainly can't blame them for taking advantage of a legal, money-making opportunity.

Given my hatred for MFA sites, I was ecstatic to hear on Monday that Google has sent email out to MFA publishers that their accounts will be disabled starting June 1. This is great news. Although Jen from Jensense.com stated that both MFA publishers and arbitrage publishers are getting their accounts disabled, Shoemoney has a video blog post refuting the news that arbitrage publishers are getting disabled.

I don't mind arbitrage publishers (that's where you buy ads for a low price and get people to visit a site where you hope they click other ads that get you a higher payment than you paid to get the click) because it's a legitimate strategy in many traditional markets (not just online ads). Although part of MFA sites strategy is arbitrage, the fact that they have absolutely zero value (they don't even try to put up some useful content) makes me really hate them.

I can't believe it's actually taken this long for Google to do this (what happened to "Don't Be Evil"?) but at least it's finally happening. This won't completely get rid of MFA sites (since they'll just switch to Yahoo or Microsoft ads) it hopefully will put a big dent in them.....I'm getting tired of continually banning them from ProductCritic.

Don't Let Scammers Hijack Your Site

In a previous post, I talked about getting rid of MFA sites. I just dislike the thought of a visitor to ProductCritic wanting to read digital camera reviews and clicking on an ad they think they want more information about only to reach a "made for adsense" site that just leeches clicks from ProductCritic visitors who are looking for genuinely helpful information.

But, blocking MFA sites isn't enough. In the niche that ProductCritic sits in, many of the adsense ads shown are from sites selling cameras and camera supplies. Unfortunately, there are quite a few instances of these camera stores running scams of various sorts. Some of these scams (and how to avoid them) are described very well by Photo.net and Bob Atkins.

I don't like the idea of some scam store using ProductCritic as a vehicle for scamming innocent visitors to our site. So, while it takes some extra effort, I pay attention to the ads that are being displayed on ProductCritic and, in addition to looking for MFA sites, when I see an ad for a store, I look it up on ResellerRatings. If it has a bad score and has a lot of negative comments, I add that site to our Adsense "Competitive Ad Filter" list so that the scam store's ad never shows up on ProductCritic again.

I hate the thought of these scammers hijacking the visitors of ProductCritic and someone potentially getting ripped off because of a visit to ProductCritic. This blog states it correctly...it's about reputation and brand. It takes extra effort to be this diligent but it's the right thing to do.

I Have A Lot More To Learn About Adsblacklist

So I've been using AdsBlackList for a little while now. Actually, more to the point, I've been putting MFA (Made For Ads) sites on my Google Adsense Competitive Ad Filter list and just using AdsBlackList to keep track of all the MFA sites I see on ProductCritic.

I've read a few blog posts and related comments about it not working or reducing overall revenue. I'm not sure I've seen a reduction in revenue yet (still too early to tell) but I might try an experiment in the second week of March to see what happens when I remove the sites on the Ad Filter list.

Still, I'm debating with myself because my main purpose for putting those sites on the list is not just for increasing revenue (since some posts say that Google already puts in the highest paying ads automatically since that's the best for Google...which makes sense). My main purpose for putting the sites on my filter list is that I hate MFA sites and everything they stand for and I think that I'm doing a disservice to people visiting ProductCritic if they click on an Ad and it takes them to a completely useless site for them. I know, as a visitor of many sites myself, that if I exit a site, I'd sure like to go somewhere that is also as useful as the site I just came from. Why would I want anything that creates a bad user experience? I think the quality of the sites that advertise on your site reflect on the quality of your site overall (even subconsiously) to a visitor.

Anyways, I'm going to run my experiment in a couple weeks. If I actually get more revenue by removing the MFA sites, I have a bigger dilemma....but I think I already know what I'm going to choose either way.

What would you do if you found that MFA sites brought you more revenue but reflected lower quality on your site?

Get Full Referral URL's Despite Using Analytics

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm completely addicted to the stats generated by ProductCritic. Maybe it's just the fact that we gain knowledge on areas we need to tweak for the site (and we're tweaking on an almost daily basis).

Besides the server logs (which I don't check all the time), we use Google Analytics as our main source of information about visits to the site. Analytics provides a large amount of data and first time users of this tool can easily find themselves overwhelmed.

Although I look at almost all areas of Analytics from time to time, I mainly focus my daily stats fix on two areas. The first is Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source. I want to know where visitors to ProductCritic are coming from. It's been quite useful as we've immediately been able to determine when someone links to ProductCritic and where that link exists.


The second area that I use in Analytics is Search Engine Marketing/CPC vs Organic Conversion. Although we currently don't use Adwords, this section is still extremely useful for us as it provides us with the ability to see what keywords people are using to find ProductCritic via searches (hence "Organic Convesion"). Since we get a majority of our traffic from search engines, the information here gives us some indication about whether we should concentrate more effort on aggregating reviews for digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones.

So, what does all this have to do with getting full referral URL's? Well, that's one thing that Google Analytics does NOT do well. For example, last week, we noticed a sharp spike of referrals from the forums at dpreview.com. Although Analytics showed us the referrals, we couldn't tell EXACTLY where they came from (only that they came from forums.dpreview.com). We could check the server logs, but if you don't have access to them, there's an easier way.....sign on and use HitTail.com. It's an awesome free service and although most people use it primarily for keyword suggestions, the tool gives you every referral URL in full detail. Since it also does this for searches, you can click on the links that HitTail.com gives you to exactly reproduce the searches that people use (including ones from localized versions of Google).

Note that we're not affiliated in any way with HitTail.com....it's just a great FREE tool that everyone who's serious about tweaking their site for optimal revenue should use.

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Kill Bad Ads From Your Site And Increase Your Revenue

I can't stand all those Made For Ads (MFA) sites that are all over the internet. You know the ones I mean. They are sites that have nothing on them but more ads. These sites are absolutely content free and add nothing to the Internet community. They are the cockroaches...wait, leeches is better, of the Internet. I don't even want to link to one of them here because I can't stand giving them any more attention then they deserve.

Don't you hate it when you look at your Adsense stats and see clicks that pay you less than 10 cents? Sometimes, you'll get clicks that pay you 1 cent! I've learned that many of these clicks come from ads that are actually MFA sites. You only get a certain number of people clicking on an ad in a certain day and you definitely don't want that click wasted on an ad that pays 1 cent!

So, what can you do about them? First, you need to find them. Maybe there's an easier method to do this but I do this manually. I reload my page (at ProductCritic) and view the Adsense ads that are displayed. While some of them are quite obviously real sites (not MFA) like sonystyle.com and nytimes.com, you will also see some sites that you may be suspicious of. I open up a separate browser tab and type that link into the address box (NEVER click on your own ads) to double-check that my suspicions are correct.

For ProductCritic, because it is a review aggregator site for digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones, I seem to get lots of ads that look very relevant to the content but are actually MFA. An example of one of these sites (check it out if you want but don't click on an ad), is digital-slr.info. Sounds relevant to cameras, right? Nope, it's a horrible, waste-of-time, Made For Ads site. The people who run these sites buy up a ton of domain names, stick on a template (most of them look identical) and then just load the page with ads. Once one of your visitors reaches that site, what's the most natural way for them to exit it....click an ad! After all, there's nothing else to do on those sites.

My sense is that these MFA sites pay low prices per click for long tail keywords, hope to get some visitors to their sites (which they set up for next to nothing) and then get paid a lot more for ads on their site. This is called "Adsense Arbitrage" and I'd write a post about it but there's plenty of good posts already like this one.

Now that you've found one of these sites showing ads on your site, what do you do? Login to your Adsense account, and click the tab entitled "Adsense Setup". Then click on the link marked "Competitive Ad Filter". Enter the url of the site (you don't need the "http://" or the "www.") into the Content Filter box provided. For the above example, I'd add in "digital-slr.info" and then click "Save Changes". Now in about 12-24 hours, ads for this site will no longer be displayed on your site.

One additional step that everyone should take is to help out the community. Head on over to AdsBlackList.com and set up and account. Submit the URL of the MFA site that you just found and after approval of 4 other readers (who confirm that it is indeed a MFA site), it will be added to their blacklist. Blacklists from AdsBlackList can be automatically generated for you to add to your Adsense Content Filter.

How's my success been so far? Well, since I started doing this, I've had zero clicks that have been low paying (e.g. 10 cents or less). Every day, I watch new ones pop up on ProductCritic and need to add them to my content filter on Adsense. It takes some diligence but I believe it is well worth it. First, you get benefits because you are increasing the quality of the contextual advertising on your site and you are not "wasting" your site's ad clicks. Second, the visitors of your site don't get transferred to one of these MFA sites and when they actually click on an ad, they are more likely to find what they are really after.

Too bad Adsense Content Filter only allows 200 URL's. I'm sure I'll find more than 200 MFA's to block from advertising on ProductCritic. Try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you!

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Yahoo Challenging Google Adwords

PC World has an article about Yahoo's revamped Sponsored Search. I haven't tried Google Adwords yet as I'm still trying to figure out what keywords I'd use for ProductCritic. Since Yahoo only has 22% of the US search market vs. Google's 63%, you might be able to buy keywords for cheaper with Yahoo's Sponsored Search. Since you can't use Adsense and Yahoo ads together on the same site (even if they don't appear on the same page), I'm sticking with Adsense until I have a much better sense of what's working and what isn't.

One of the tools I'm using to determine the best keywords is HitTail. I'll provide more details in a followup post detailing some of the tools and sites I'm using the manage this blog and the main ProductCritic site.