I considered naming the guys who dressed in pig masks and robbed the Rolex store inside Bellagio as the Idiots of the week this week, but then someone else won out.

And the winner of Idiots of the Week March 27, 2017 is…

THE CLICK FRAUDSTERS

Full Disclosure:  I should thank these idiots because they helped me in huge ways as I will explain below.  The thing is they were trying to hurt me and ended up helping me without even realizing the net impact of their actions.  That is what makes them idiots.  There are several of these people.  Thanks to technology, amazing software, nerds on my staff and the wonderful folks at Google, we know the names, phone numbers, IP addresses, and even the physical locations of these idiots.  Actually, they are dumb criminals, which is why they won out over the Bellagio Rolex robbers as idiots of the week.  To understand what makes them idiots you have to understand how Google Adwords works, so this post will be a little bit techy.  But I trust you will also find it quite interesting and satisfying.  Here goes.

GOOGLE ADWORDS

Doctor Strip Club advertises on Google Adwords.  It works like this.  I create ads to get people to choose us for round trip transportation and free entry to Vegas’ best strip clubs.  I then choose “Key Words” and phrases that people search for when they are interested in visiting a strip club in Las Vegas.  When people search for information on strip clubs in Las Vegas, Google Adwords displays my ad in the search results.  When the people click on my ad, they are led to my webpage or phone number and Google Adwords charges me for that “click”.  This is called PPC or Pay Per Click advertising.  The cool thing is that Google links Adwords, Analytics, and a multitude of other services to my Adwords account.  So Google reports to me how many clicks my ads received relative to the number of times my ad was displayed; this is called Click Through Rate or CTR.  Google also tracks Conversions which in my case is the number of people who click our ad and then actually call us or complete our online reservation form and go to a Strip Club in Las Vegas.  Conversions are an important statistic, because when people go to a Vegas strip club through us, we make money.

CLICK FRAUD

Click fraud has been a thing since the inception of pay per click advertising.  Competitors do Google searches for terms related to their industry and when a competitor’s ad pops up, they click on it.  This cost the advertiser money for which they didn’t get any business.  The law defines it as “Theft of Property”, “Interference With Commerce” “Fraud” and since it is over the internet, when it rises above a certain dollar cost, the perpetrators are charged with “Felony Wire Fraud”.  There are a great number of cases of this.

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW CLICK FRAUD WORKS

Let’s say you are considering going to a Strip Club in Las Vegas and you’ve heard the name Sapphire, but don’t know anything about the club.  You do a google search for Sapphire Las Vegas on your phone and this appears in your search results.

You click on this ad and it takes you to my review of Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club in Las Vegas.  You like what you read and you complete my reservation form or call me and go to Sapphire.  I get charged for that click, but I get paid because you made a reservation and Google tracks your reservation or call as a conversion.  The click fraudster would search just like you did and click on the ad.  But they are not interested in going to Sapphire at all.  As soon as they click on my ad, they click their back button.  Then they click again, then back again, then again…and they repeat this over and over.  Each time they click on the ad, I get charged a fee for that click.  The fraudster’s goal is to hurt my business by costing me money.

CLICK FRAUDSTERS AT WORK

So last week click fraudsters attacked Doctor Strip Club’s Google Ads on several different days.  In once instance they clicked on one ad 317 times in one hour.  Apparently some competitors don’t have enough business on their own to stay busy.

WHY THE CLICK FRAUDSTERS ARE IDIOTS

First, they are idiots because their fraud actually helped me. Behind the scenes Google uses all kinds of variables to determine when to show my ads and how much to charge me for each click. Google wants you to find what you are looking for when you do a Google search.  So they place high value on things like relevance–how relative my ad is to what you are searching.  Google gives ads and keywords a “Quality Score” based on how relevant they are. They evaluate relevance by things like Click Through Rate.  And when an ad gets a high click through rate for a specific search phrase, Google thinks that ad is a very relevant ad and they raise your quality score.  A high quality score means your ad shows more often and Google charges you less for the click.  If your quality score is 10 and your competitor’s is 7, your ad will show before theirs and your clicks will cost less than theirs.

So, when the Click Fraudster Idiots clicked 73 times on one appearance of my ad, Google calls that a 7,300% click through rate and raises my quality score for that key word to a 10.  As a result, I paid only 6 cents per click to appear first for that keyword while competitors with lower quality scores were paying over $2.29 per click to appear below me for the same key word.  Thanks Click Fraudsters.

Here’s an example from our Google Adwords Account for Sunday March 26, 2017.  Private information is blacked out but you can see several key things.  First, as a result of the Click Fraudster’s effort on Friday and Saturday nights, Google has given many of our keywords a quality score of 10.  As a result, I’m paying only 6-35 cents per click for these clicks, yet my ads are appearing in the first or second position.

Second, notice the fraudsters tried to get to us by clicking 48 times on only 3 appearances of one of our keywords.  The 17 clicks on 22 appearances is also suspicious.  But notice the idiots only cost me $2.69 for all their fraudulent effort.  Finally, note that in this one campaign on Sunday March 26, 2017 we only spent $60.32 and for that we got 13 conversions.  That means…

On Sunday night we sent 13 different groups and a total of 42 people to Las Vegas Strip Clubs from this one campaign alone, and it only cost us $60.32 in advertising.  Thank you click fraud idiots for making our Google Ads so efficient. 

AND IT GETS EVEN BETTER

Google is aware that click fraud is a thing.  So their bots constantly track and remove invalid clicks.  Google’s systems do this in almost real time, so we are never actually charged for most of the invalid clicks and they are removed quickly. On Saturday night, the Doctor Strip Club team watched and laughed as we saw our Google Ads that got 317 clicks in one hour roll back to only 22 clicks in a matter of 5 minutes.  So, we never even got charged for most of those fraudulent clicks.  The click fraudster’s efforts didn’t hurt us. Of course Google’s systems don’t catch everything and we did get charged for some of the fraudulent clicks.

This is where it gets even better.  So we called Google this morning and went through all the fraudulent clicks. Google issued us a credit for the fraudulent clicks that actually exceeds the cost of those clicks.  So, the click fraudsters actually made us a profit on the cost of their clicks and improved our quality scores.  In other words, google paid us for the work of the click fraudsters and we now get better results for lower costs.  It’s a double win.

  AND FINALLY,

I’m even more amazed by software and systems than the fact I spent 30 years getting paid to enlarge and improve the appearance of women’s breasts.  You see, when someone clicks on our Google ad we get huge amounts of data, even if they click back so fast that they never even get to our web site.  We instantly know they type of device they are using, their IP address, their internet service provider, the type of cell phone they have and the version of software they are running on that phone, their phone number, their physical location at the moment of that click an in many instances we even know their name.  So, if you were using a desktop at the New Mexico School for the Deaf to search for strip clubs in Las Vegas and clicked on Dr. Strip Club’s ad, we’d know that.  If you were attacking Doctor Strip Club’s Google Ads from Mi Casita apartments in Las Vegas we’d know that.  Say, you lived 2 or 3 houses from the intersection of Marila and Fontayne in Las Vegas and were viewing Doctor Strip Club’s Google ads, we’d know that. If you’re a tourist on a laptop inside your hotel room at Mandalay Bay, we’d know that.  If you’re a tourist from Utah using your cell phone to click on our ad while standing at Bond Bar inside Cosmopolitan Hotel Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard, we know that.  Technology is Amazing.

Another interesting thing is when you use a tablet, phone, or other mobile device to search google and click on our ads, we can then track your physical location at any time by pinging the IP address on that mobile device…this works even with the battery powered off. We recently used this functionality to help a customer locate a lost cell phone he’d left in a chair in the strip club.  His phone was tracked and found under the seat cushion even though the battery was dead.  So, yes we know when someone who used their cell phone to attack our google ads goes to hang out at their favorite seedy bar behind the Flamingo parking garage.  Not only do we know, but Google knows, and lawyers and private investigators know and legal authorities know as well.  There is no such thing as privacy in today’s world. I thought even an idiot would know that, but apparently not.

STAY TUNED…I’M SURE SOMEONE WILL STEP UP AND BE THE IDIOTS OF THE WEEK FOR NEXT WEEK.  And in the meantime, If you’d like to visit one of Vegas best strip clubs