Muse Creation: AdWords Fraud!

[Vacman]

Hey everyone,

I'm creating my muse.

I've got the website up and an ad campaign running with Google AdWords right now.

I'm attempting to track how many "sales" I make in order to determine if there is indeed a market for my product.

Anyhow, on my site, you can click on a button to go to an order page, and then enter in all your information and then when you click order, you get an error page.

Right now, I have Google tracking those who have come in off of my AdWords campaign and if they hit my "error" page then it's counting as a sale.

(Because this theoretically means that they put in all their billing info and hit the order button.)

Google shows that I've made one sale already in less than 24 hours.

That's pretty good considering that I haven’t optimized any of my marketing.

Here's my question:

Could this "sale" or "conversion" be a bot that just simply went through all the pages of my site and didn't really order, or plan on ordering anything?

Does this ever happen? Basically, where a computer program would click on your ad on Google and then go to every page you have and then just leave?

If so this could skew my sales results and I really want accurate info.

Part of the reason why I ask is because in my tracking information through bluehost it shows that the person who hit my "error page" went through the site and hit my pages in this sequence:

Page........Time

Main page: 10:55:24
Order page: 10:55:35
Error page: 10:55:38

So, that's kind of strange.

I'm not sure about how accurate the time logs are either.

Should I be concerned that this was NOT a sale?

Or am I being overly cautious?

Thanks for your help!

[Vagabond]

hmm, i would assume that was not a sale since the entire thign took 14seconds. Wait a little bit until the numbers go up. Are you sure it wasn't you clicking through the pages to see what they look like?

Also, I wouldnt do an error page, I would say something like youre backordered or updating your ebook or something.

Error pages give a bad vibe IMO

[jetpacklife]

Are you running your adwords campaign on the Google Content network? It should probably be avoided if you're only looking for legit clicks.

[Gerto]

I agree that an error page is not a good idea. Especially not if people have just entered their payment information (people are very cautious with this and certainly do not like error pages after giving away their information!)

Anyway, does your server support PHP? You can easily write a small script to just mail the information to you. That way you can check it and you don't just throw it away.

[Vacman]

Hey Vagabond, jetpacklife, and Gerto,

Thanks for your help!

Yea, I agree after thinking about it that the error page is not a great idea, at least now how I had it set up.

I've changed it to reflect a back-order situation rather than specifically an error.

I had the site jimmy rigged just using the Page Wizard from Bluehost.com.

Long story short, the Page Wizard program is very limited, and does not do what I want it to do.

I'm reworking the site from the ground up and I spent all weekend learning the basics of CSS web design. I'm going to make the site look much more respectable, and trustworthy.

I'll also incorporate a function to email me the client’s information so that I will be able to contact them once the product is actually available.

Thanks again for your support!

[ardor]

Research robots.txt (just type it in google) this is a file that web crawlers look at to figure out what to do when you see your site. Usually web crawlers want to look at every page of your site, This is usually a good thing, but not so much when it comes to Testing your market, as web crawlers are never going to buy your product even if they help drive traffic to your website.


Secondly if your testing your muse as outlined in the book (which i agree with) you need the customer to type in there billing information*, if this Customer wants your item but has to ask her husband for the credit card and he tells her No. Then its not a sell.

*Please note you should log or store the customers billing information.

[VitaminD]

This thread freaked me out at first. I was like "whoa, what if my stats were all off?" After research, I conclude that they weren't, with a margin of error that's acceptable and still gives me the go-ahead for the muse.

Still, this just sounds like a potential reason not to take action. The preliminary testing serves two basic functions:

-Determining demand
-Assessing the best ads

No matter what, the second will be accomplished. So if you have a good enough reason to go into production, I say do it. If you fail, you're out a few hundred bucks or so. If you succeed, you're up one muse.