How to Protect Adwords Accounts from Hackers
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
I recently had a bad experience with Google Adwords. Our main Adwords account was hacked! I hope in sharing this story and what I learned from it, I will be able to help others take preventative action so it never happens to them.
It was a Monday morning and like any other Monday morning I was logging into my affiliate network accounts and my pay per click accounts to check on our numbers over the weekend. Upon logging into our main Adwords account I was surprised to see a total spend over the weekend of $30,000!
My adrenaline started to rush and my mind raced to figure out if I had turned a bid up too high and charged over $30,000 in clicks in 2 days. I checked the date range. It was correct. I checked the affiliate network to see what kind of earnings spending $30,000 in a weekend brought in. Nothing was out of the ordinary, and there certainly wasn’t enough to cover that kind of spending.
So I dug deeper to see which adgroup might have taken off, all the while I was wondering how my budgeting could have been blown out so badly. I keep a reasonable budget limit on all of our Adwords campaigns to keep a handle on runaway adgroups.
I opened up the campaign and immediately noticed that the campaign budget had been changed to $20,000/day. I saw which adgroup it was, and realized this was an adgroup that had been virtually inactive for several months. I checked on the ads and found that the ads that charged all those clicks were not my ads. They were not affiliate ads at all. They were driven directly to a forex site. I checked the bid and the keywords and found that both had been changed. The bid was set to $20.00 a click and the keywords were forex based. My keywords had been deleted.
 My nerves started to calm as I realized my Adwords account had been hacked. I thought surely Google would have a record of the hacker who accessed my account. They would be able to tell it was not me who made those changes. At that point, I knew they would credit my account for the charges in question.
I immediately contacted Google. They had never heard of any account being hacked, so my issue was escalated to the top level team for a click fraud investigation. The next day they gave me word that they were still investigating but the preliminary result was a confirmed case of an account hijacking. They shut down my account, and advised me to move everything over into a new account. Thank god for the Adwords Editor! You’ve got to love copy and paste.
I contacted my credit card company and they cancelled my card and established a new one to be sent out in the mail.
Upon completion of the investigation Google informed me that the account had indeed been hijacked, and advised me how to avoid such a hijacking in the future. I asked if they had the IP address of the hacker, but they said they did not.
I was curious because I do have several employees with access to that account and I wanted to be sure they were not responsible. In the process of communications with Google, they accidentally leaked an internal email that had the IP address in it. I looked it up and it was in the Netherlands. No surprises there. At least I know my employees are honest.
So how can you protect your Adwords account from being hacked? I have put together a few tips
- Have everyone who works in your account use a separate username and password. This way if one password is compromised you can just eliminate one user’s access. This also simplifies things if you have to fire an employee, because you just take one user’s access away and everyone else’s passwords stay the same. This was the main thing Google advised us to do in the future. You can give other users access to your account under the Account tab through the Access link.
- Use randomly generated passwords like those that are generated using Roboform. The password that was compromised was one of those made up ones that are easy to remember. Even though it had 2 numerals in it, it was much easier to break than one that is randomly generated.
- Keep your budgeting in place. You should set your campaign budgets about twice what they usually spend. This way you will not lose money by hitting your budget, but nothing will run away from you. (unless the hacker raises your budget like mine did, but budgeting could protect you from a lazy hacker who forgets this step)
- Have someone check on your account on a daily basis. The person who hacked our Adwords account clearly planned the change over the weekend to maximize the traffic he would get out of it. It was changed late Friday night, and I did not discover it until Monday morning. He also chose a forgotten campaign in the hopes it would not be noticed. It had not received any clicks in over a month.
In looking back on this event, I realize that it did not turn out so badly. Google recognized the account was hijacked and credited the account. The Adwords Editor made it relatively easy to move all our campaigns into a new account. The credit card did not get compromised before it was cancelled. It was not that bad for me, but it could have been much worse.
What if the hacker had simply replaced my affiliate ID with his own across all of our campaigns? I might have been managing his campaigns for a week before I even noticed, and I doubt Google would have given us credit in that scenario.
Advertisers beware and protect your account access. Even Google gets hacked now and then.
Viral Marketing Metrics?
Filed Under Internet Marketing, Viral Marketing | 1 Comment
Viral Marketing has become one of the hot topics in internet marketing circles for the last year or so.
The concept of viral marketing is intricately tied into the concept of Web 2.0, which describes the new cycle of web communities through which consumers are able to generate content on any subject, company, service or politician. Any company that ignores the power of the people in the blogosphere and beyond, do so at their peril.
The power of social networks can work for or against a company. I have been contacted by large companies after posting comments about them on this humble blog. This just goes to show that large companies have learned to monitor what people are saying about them. They try to engage anyone with negative comments and see if they can remedy the problem. I have to say from my own personal experience that it is empowering to know that a large company will come to you when you have a problem. That, my friends, is the beauty of the blogosphere.
While keeping a lid on negative “buzz” is desirable, creating positive buzz is just as appealing. Marketers have been talking about how they can create positive “buzz” about their company for a number of years.
A successful viral marketing campaign has become the holy grail of marketing. It is not easy to get consumers excited enough about your company to make them want to tell all their friends about it. Study after study has verified that the most trusted referral is a face-to-face recommendation. So it is no wonder marketers endlessly toil to come up with ideas that will get people talking about them, online and off.
Entire marketing agencies dedicated to web buzz have cropped up. One of them, Webbed Marketing, just released a free tool for use by the general public (PRweb).
This tool is called the Webbed-O-Meter and claims to rate the buzz you have generated about your website in the blogosphere and the social networks. It gives your site a score between 1 and 100. The higher the score the higher the “buzz factor” you have been able to generate.
You are probably wondering how it works. You simply enter your domain name into the search box and the system checks 10 authoritative social networking sources for mentions of your site. Here is what they say about the algorithm:
Algorithms calculate a site’s online buzz by utilizing ten authoritative sources such as: Yahoo!, Digg, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia. The Webbed-O-Meter is free and available to anyone at http://www.webbedmarketing.com/webbedometer.
I may be wrong, but I think this is the first viral marketing metric available, and it could prove a useful tool. While checking references to a domain is a start, I think there is room for improvement. There is currently no way to tell if the buzz that your site has generated is positive or negative. I would recommend the developers work on this. On the other hand, Bill over at Webbed Marketing has written that even bad buzz can have some benefits.
Google acquires DoubleClick
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google, Performics | 2 Comments
Google announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc. for a cool $3.1 billion in cash from Hellman & Friedman along with JMI equity and management. In the affiliate marketing world, DoubleClick is best known as the parent company of Performics, which has long been considered one of the big three affiliate networks alongside Commission Junction and Linkshare.
Google is looking to expand their advertising network capabilities, and this is perhaps another move by Google to get into the affiliate marketing space. I have long thought they had larger plans than the simple entry into the CPA space they announced a couple weeks ago. Google wants a piece of the affiliate marketing pie, and apparently they just got themselves one. It only cost them $3 billion.
The official reasons for the acquisitions are as follows:
The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers:
- For users, the combined company will deliver an improved experience on the web, by increasing the relevancy and the quality of the ads they see.
- For online publishers, the combination provides access to new advertisers, which creates a powerful opportunity to monetize their inventory more efficiently.
- For agencies and advertisers, Google and DoubleClick will provide an easy and efficient way to manage both search and display ads in one place. They will be able to optimize their ad spending across different online media using a common set of metrics.
I have no doubt that Google will greatly expand their advertising network and publisher content alliances through this acquisition. I have to ask myself where Google is headed. In light of their recent attacks on the affiliate marketing space in both Adwords and through their search algorithm: Is Google out to kill affiliate marketing once and for all? Are they going to disband the traditional form of affiliate marketing that Performics currently engages in and replace it with their own proprietary “affiliate technology”? Somehow, I doubt it.
I think they are more interested in keeping the network as it is and collecting the revenue share from merchants. But parent companies and affiliate networks don’t always share the same viewpoint. The last time a large affiliate network’s interests clashed with it’s parent company was at Commission Junction. It is widely thought that ValueClick was behind the ill-advised Javascript Link Initiative that caused so much outrage in the affiliate marketing space. It took thousands of complaints, a petition, and several large merchants considering leaving the network before CJ backed down from requiring the transition to javascript links. Let’ hope Google does not have similar plans in their takeover of Performics.
WebMetrics Guru covers Search Engine Strategies NY
Filed Under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
(PRWeb) Know More Media’s blog WebMetricsGuru.com is providing real time reporting of the Search Engine Strategies NYC Conference & Expo 2007 being held in the Hilton New York in New York City on April 10-13, 2007. By covering the content and topics being discussed at the conference, they are providing access to the happenings for those of us who were not able to make it to New York this week. On their first day of coverage they are reporting 1,017 new subscribers! That just goes to show that people are really craving the information they are providing. Kudos to web analystics guru Marshall Sponder for covering this conference.
Brand Names and Search Engines
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Online Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
I just finished reading an article on a study of brand names and search engines done by Hitwise and discussed on Clickz. The article discusses how 15% of all brand searches are diverted from the company’s site:
After searchers type in a brand-name query on a search engine, only 85 percent end up at that brand’s Web site, while the rest are diverted to competitor’s sites, comparison shopping engines and affiliates. That’s according to a new study released by Hitwise, which undertook the research after determining that 75 of the most popular 100 searches in February involved trademarked brand names.
While the analysis considers a trip to an affiliate site as a diversion from the company’s site, I disagree with this analysis. The purpose of the affiliate site and the company’s site is to make the sale. Many affiliates presell the customer and then send them on the brand site. This is the whole purpose of the affiliate marketer, and the best affiliate marketers can do this better than the company site itself.
What should be of great concern to the brand managers is how many of those searching for their brand get picked up by competitors. These customers can be considered lost, because it is unlikely they will arrive back at the brand site. The article doesn’t discuss this aspect of the issue. How much revenue is lost to the competition? I would estimate at least 10 percent of the 15 percent quoted above go to competitors. It is true the company has to pay affiliates for the work they do, but only once the sale is made. The margin is slightly tighter. But when customers are lost to the competition, the sale is lost entirely. Which is better, a sale at a tighter margin or no sale at all?
To prevent lost sales such as these I advocate open search policies by affiliate managers. As I have said many times, when the search page is filled with affiliates, there is no room left for the competition. This policy can be harmonized with in-house search marketing efforts by requiring a bid cap, and reserving the number one spot for the company’s ad. The other nine ads on the page should be filled with affiliates. After all, the affiliate and the company all want the same thing, to make sales. There is no reason these two positions are mutually exclusive.