What caused this? Your opinions please...

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windjc

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Sep 24, 2008
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Very weird thing happened to me on MSN search today.

About 4 am last night I had a click from an obscure, hard to spell long ass keyword. Since then I have had over 200 clicks on the EXACT same keyword all from different IPs.

So, I'd think click fraud, right? Well, as it turns out I've actually had about a 10-15% ROI (well below my average, but still a profit) on these clicks.

In fact, some of these clicks have converted TWICE instead of once, which I have NEVER had on this product.

Any suggestions on what this crazy oddity is?

My first two guesses was someone sent out an email blast to their friends and for some reason said "hey, enter this EXACTLY" or someone put it on their blog with a screenshot or something.

I mean, I'm marketing to a lower IQ crowd and this long tail keyword is HARD TO SPELL, and its spelled correctly on every click.

Lol.
 


Are the referral urls exactly the same or just the keyword? It could be a pre-filled form on a toolbar/search widget (dumb luck, they chose your word).

How far apart (geographically) are the IPs? It may be from something on tv; if they are too far apart, could be something on one of the video sites. Something where the word is plastered on the screen for a while.
 
indianman said:
Watch out for high refunds. Inform your affiliate manager.
Click to expand...


Well, fortunately, there havent been a lot of sales, just enough to make a bit more than break even.

So i took the main keyword that triggered the search and negative keyworded the obscure as hell word in the phrase.

Then I entered the exact phrase in "exact match" and lowered the bid to next to nothing.

I just basically made these clicks free.
 
^^^something triggered the searches though. i doubt a load of people just suddenly had a vision

hmmmm must search "acaii beeries"
 
itchy said:
^^^something triggered the searches though. i doubt a load of people just suddenly had a vision

hmmmm must search "acaii beeries"
Click to expand...

yeh, this is a crazy long ass keyword with what looks like some obscure Italian or Greek name in it. in fact the keyword describes something this guy did. totally unrelated to my campaign.lol.
 
Perhaps a popular blog has some sort of story, so people are looking up said long arsed keyword in search to find more info, and for some bizarre reason, you're ranking above the fold?

Unlikely, but possible.

Have you entered this long tail and seen what else comes up? Both with and without parenthesis?
 
Sometimes I've gotten weird traffic from MSN content network. Large volumes all of a sudden that still converts. I would guess that there was an article out there that triggered your ad on the content network.

My 2 cents from my previous experience.
 
HarveyJ said:
Perhaps a popular blog has some sort of story, so people are looking up said long arsed keyword in search to find more info, and for some bizarre reason, you're ranking above the fold?

Unlikely, but possible.

Have you entered this long tail and seen what else comes up? Both with and without parenthesis?
Click to expand...

Yes the long tail keyword is a title of a news article that is a few weeks (maybe months) old. But I have to believe it was posted on a blog, because the traffic came for about 24 hours, then stopped. Pretty nice though, I got about 500 clicks and once I rearranged my bids I made about $400-$500 off of it in a few hours.

But it had to have been on a blog or email blast or something. But the long tail keyword was so ridiculous that I was one of only two ads showing and my "extraordinary ad copy" ;) brought them in like moths to the flame.
 
this happened to me for a huge acai keyword that was all CAPS I was getting a ton of converting clicks as both my PPC and SEO sites weretop 3 for this term for months - I couldn't figure it out until I checked a bunch of email seed accounts I have and noticed some mailer continued to fire this out- and since it was all over the email I suspsect people who were interested but hesitant were just copy/pasting it into search engines thus triggering the bizzare all caps identical queries.


Was real stumped before figuring that out however.
 
had sort of the same thing happen the other day because of a CBS news story.. werd
I was able to determine this because the term appeared on googletrends and there was a cbs news story the same day
 
I checked Trends today and it's not like this was a hot search item. I think it's an MSN flaw (perhaps a one off referrer problem), as the case was exactly the same, and the special characters in the search term were identical.
 
This might actually be a good way to generate some cheap traffic

1. Go look for phrases in popular blog post/newsletters
2. bid exact match for that phrase.
3. ?????
4. Profit
 
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