I work for a company involved in search engine advertising.
While it's technically possible to track conversions, very very few customers actually do it. Some don't have a great way to track it (health-care products where there's a privacy issue, brand advertising, informational advertising, services where there's no obvious immediate call to action, etc.)
Even among those who do track "conversions," I'd say under 10% of them actually define a conversion as something where money is exchanged immediately, which makes it hard to defraud. More than half of the conversion tracking we see just requires the user to spend a certain amount of time on the website, visit a certain number of pages or to provide an email address.
Not surprisingly, we see a massive dropoff in conversion percentage when money needs to change hands. It's more than 90%. Also, not surprisingly, when some action is required for conversion, we see more than half of the visitors taking that exact action and nothing more.
Our analysis of the above is that more than half of clickers on search ads, and probably more like 80%+ are just bots (or human "bots" in clickfarms) clicking the ads and then pretending to convert. Their incentive is that they are clicking ads on search pages where they get a share of the revenue.
Interestingly, when we alert customers to this dynamic and try to get them to shift their ad spend or conversion tracking to prevent this kind of behavior, they actively do not care and prevent us from doing it. Our analysis there is that marketing managers in general know that what they're doing is largely ineffective, but they don't want to admit that to their bosses because then it puts their jobs at risk.
So, what we do is help them maximize where we can, without pushing them too hard on the above: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
While it's technically possible to track conversions, very very few customers actually do it. Some don't have a great way to track it (health-care products where there's a privacy issue, brand advertising, informational advertising, services where there's no obvious immediate call to action, etc.)
Even among those who do track "conversions," I'd say under 10% of them actually define a conversion as something where money is exchanged immediately, which makes it hard to defraud. More than half of the conversion tracking we see just requires the user to spend a certain amount of time on the website, visit a certain number of pages or to provide an email address.
Not surprisingly, we see a massive dropoff in conversion percentage when money needs to change hands. It's more than 90%. Also, not surprisingly, when some action is required for conversion, we see more than half of the visitors taking that exact action and nothing more.
Our analysis of the above is that more than half of clickers on search ads, and probably more like 80%+ are just bots (or human "bots" in clickfarms) clicking the ads and then pretending to convert. Their incentive is that they are clicking ads on search pages where they get a share of the revenue.
Interestingly, when we alert customers to this dynamic and try to get them to shift their ad spend or conversion tracking to prevent this kind of behavior, they actively do not care and prevent us from doing it. Our analysis there is that marketing managers in general know that what they're doing is largely ineffective, but they don't want to admit that to their bosses because then it puts their jobs at risk.
So, what we do is help them maximize where we can, without pushing them too hard on the above: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."