My name is George Pluss.
I'm doing a lot of online newsletter advertising.
Recently in June, July and early August I've been
advertising in one large ezine (100,000 subscribers).
I always buy only solo ads.
The solo campaigns in that ezine produced quite good
amounts of clickthrus.
I use a 3rd party tracking service - www.urltrak.com
that shows very detailed statistics on each clickthru.
I've spent $400 on several campaigns in that ezine
until I found very strange things about all campaigns.
After careful analysis of all stats for all campaigns
I concluded that this advertising was fraudulent and most clickthrus were fake!
I am pretty sure that a hitbot software was used to
"click" on my links.
Facts:
1) Most of the "hits" were coming from 1 IP and 1 ISP.
The IP appears to be located in Turkey
IP: 212.253.2.205
ISP: asy205. As2532. Sol. Superonline.com
2) The proportion of this and other hits is huge.in
some campaigns the above IP and ISP took 80% or more. Say out of 200 hits it takes 170.
There is no way someone will click 170 times on one
link.
Also this IP and ISP appears in EVERY campaign.
3) Referrer shows as this ezine site in most campaigns. This is impossible in ANY normal way. With email campaigns a user reaches my website by reading his email and clicking on one of the links in it. Referrer in this case will show as his email client link (like yahoo and
hotmail etc), but in most cases will be blank.
It is only with hitbot software generated fake hits
you have the ability to fill in a referrer of your
choice.
4) In one of the campaigns all hits came from the very
first link in my ad copy. I know this because this was the only correct link in the ad copy, others were coded with different codes and NONE was clicked on.
Usually most clicks come from links that are closer to
an end of an ad copy. So all clicks from the first link is almost impossible.
At this point I contacted the newsletter administrator
and told him about the above things. The administrator
denied everything and told me everything was OK and
that he doesn't know what is a hitbot software or how
to generate fake clicks.
I then watched 2 additional campaigns that were
already scheduled.
5) In my next campaign run referer showed many
different websites. Most of them DO NOT even EXIST!
Examples: http://e-emprestimos.com,
www.einceptions.com, www.baciex.com
These domains are not even registered!!! How can they
be referrers? Each click had different domain - most
of them are not registered.
6) After I immediately told administrator about this,
the next campaign that was in a day or 2 showed only
seemingly "normal" hits. BUT only 6 hits unique in
total! Compared to 200-300 uniques from previous
campaigns.
The above 6 facts prove 2 things:
- that a hitbot or another way to create fake clicks
was used on my links.
- that the newsletter administrator was involved in
this (he was my only contact)
I have all proof available in my stats provider
account.
I of course contacted the administrator asking for
explanation and full refund of all advertising money spent.instead the CEO of that company Tony Marino replied.
After me explaining to him the situation, he promised
to look into it.
I urged him to take action, start an investigation and
tell me his opinion.
But then he told me not to bother him and then just
blascklisted my email address. And threatened with legal
action if I started to "defame" or "discredit" his
company.
I have all emails exchanged re this issue.
All money was transferred thru paypal and purchases were made from their webpage:
http://www.christiantimesnewsletter.com/advertising/
The company info:
Www.christiantimesnewsletter.com
CEO
Tony Marino, Ph. D.
Founder, CEO
America Web Works
[email protected]
[email protected]
http://www.americawebworks.com
Newsletter Admin in charge of all advertising: Randy
[email protected]
(Note, maybe Randy and Tony is one person -
I'm not sure now and have no way to check)
George
Dalian
China, People's Republic of China
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