We have been using findwhat's service for several weeks on own own server.We have an exact detail of every IP that has ever hit us. Each day, their records show 25-30% more clicks that actually occur. When we question this, we get a response (in email) that not all of there affiliates use referring tags and cannot be tracked. This still doesnt explain why our logs do not match. We had to escalate the issue several times to get a response which ended up a refund, as they explained for, "a questionable affiliate". The traffic departments VM can be reached at 877-274-2525. Has anyone else had problems with findwhat?

Moderator Note: Other telephone number listed was removed as it was not ringing through to Miva.

Yeah, we've had similar problems with FindWhat. Although they were not nearly as bad as Kanoodle and a couple other PPCs in the level of fraudelent links. As much as I'd like to use some of these second tier PPC networks, fraud is rampant with them. Even though it is much more expensive, at least you now Overture and Google are mostly genuine clicks.

Just my opinion.

Lobo

I was glad to read this because we tried out Findwhat a couple of months back and found we were blowing through our daily budget much quicker than we thought we should have and getting no business from that traffic. We really did not think that a 7-10 listing in an only moderately competitive keyword would cause out budget to be blown in only a couple of hours. This sheds new light onto our Findwhat experience.

I have seen some extremely high rates (100% in some cases) of clickfraud for particular keywords on Miva. Have seen this for past 18 months and in my opinion Miva is passivly allowing this fraud. If you ask me the biggest problem is the lack of geotargeting. We sell software for real estate agents in USA. For the keyword 'real estate software' we were getting 75% of our traffic from non-enclish speaking countries. Got to wonder what they might use real estate software for realtors in Pakistan?

I suspect that if the clickfraud were eliminated from Miva, they would only get 5% of the traffic they get now!

Avoid them.

I cannot speak to their PPC side but the Pay per call side is fine for me. In December 04 Miva claimed to have cast away the "questionable affiliates" but everywhere you read the traffic is still questionable.
Maybe with this refreshed focus by the SEC on click fraud they (and others) could be answering questions soon?

Decided to test Miva.com (because of their low cpc) for $500...and 3 days later...and $500 gone...yes $500 in 3 days at about $0.20 per click!!

The result: NO LEADS!!! NO SALES! NOTHING!

I'm done wasting time on these supposedly low cost ppc engines :mad:

<rant>

They should not even appear at the conferences and try to blow smoke up advertisers tooshies...arg...

</rant>

I was just wondering, has anyone received any unprovoked refunds from Findwhat, Miva, or any other third teir engines? I have received 'service adjustments' from Google for click fraud in the past without having reported it myself.

Thanks

My experience with the folks at Miva has not been that great so far. I have documented fraud on a particular keyword and they are not refunding me the funds.

All the traffic that I see from them withthe keyword "real estate software" comes from bogus doorway pages and such which sell penis enlagement remedies.

We are a legitimate business and at this point I wonder if advertising with them is actually a net negative.

Scott.

Wanted to update on my Miva experience. They recognized 20% of the clicks as fraudulant. The remainder they said were high quality. But since they wanted a satisfied customer they refunded me for all the clicks. I was glad to have the funds back but after a close look at the so called high-quality clicks I realize that I just don't want that kind of traffic. To me 100% of the traffic was low-quality fraudulant clicks.

We have also had major issue and received refunds from MIVA. To answer nicncher's earlier question, I've never received a "pro-active" refund from MIVA, like you sometimes see with Google and Yahoo. What's bothersome about this is that MIVA has to know that a large portion of their traffic is bogus because everytime I report suspicious activity they have no issues refunding at least a good portion of the clicks in question... I guess at least they do that right :)

I left a detailed post on another MIVA thread that you may find interesting. It's at
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=74817#post74817

Appropriator

Findwhat should be renamed Findasiantraffic

When we used it thats pretty much all that came to us. Lots of traffic but non qualified and definitely foreign. Not much help when the service the client rendered was strictly US based lol.

I've had similar issues with FindWhat. While my clients in B2C sector had some success, clients in B2B had absolutely no success at all. Even though the CPC is considerably low, you can easily blow your month’s budget in 1 week.

Clicks received from FindWhat had a conversion rate of ZERO- other than skewing up my KPI's due to enormous number of useless clicks.

I wouldn't be surprised if Miva drops the ball on FindWhat or spins it off to some other company.

I understand that when you lose all of your budget and get 0 sales, it's pretty obvious that there is indeed click fraud going on. Do any of you use click fraud software or outsource the service to monitor click fraud to justify refunds? If so, which brands or companies do you use? I am looking into this issue currently and could use recommendations.

We currently use KeywordMax for both conversion tracking and click fraud analysis. In the end though, it's what you do with those potential fraud reports that will result in refunds or no refunds.

Also, don't be too hasty to jump to the conclusion that because there were no sales with the budget spent, there must be click fraud. It is a possibility, but not always the case. Some industries aren't suited for 2nd tier advertising. If we do use MIVA, it's mainly a branding exercise.

Aka: Miva

I no longer use them because of this same reason. Their US filter doesn't work either.

One of our clients insisted that we find a way to make Miva work.
(The CEO saw his main rival there and he just had to be there too)

After spending almost 20k in a year for only a handful of conversions our overwheliming data finally superceded his ego and we pulled him from Miva.

During that time we were able to compile some very telling statistics.
First, it's clear and as everyone has found on this forum, MIVA is ridled with click fraud. Intentional or not, it is there for sure and no amount of cheap "legit" traffic can overcome the cost of the fraud.

Our records show that the largest amount of click fraud or clicks that resulted in NO conversions for our client was generated by the IP address: 67.29.139.199, and I do mean that not one single click of the thousands resulted in a conversion. This IP address is owned by ABCsearch.

ABCsearch is going to be a the next Ad Tech event in San Fran.
I wish I could attend so I could walk right up to them with our reports and see what they have to say.

Perhaps some of you will be attending and can do this?

Notes:
Miva has given refunds without trouble and without much delay.
Miva's interface is great, easy to use and super fast.
Miva's support was responsive, but not very experienced in online marketing.


Discovery

Yes Discovery, absearch is pure junk. We experienced the same thing - a couple thousand clicks with not a single conversion.

We didn't get an overwhelming amount of traffic from Miva, but hardly any conversions either. Not worth the time to bother with, for us. We let our account run out and we're done with them.

Melissa

I have found that MIVA (FindWhat + ESpotting), and Business.com had the worst conversion rates out of about 10 CPC engines I was using

One that surprised me was GoClick.com which had a good conversion rate (ROI positive) as well as Enhance and 7search.com (these two broke even)

Mind you all of them had significantly lower ROI returns compared to Google AdWords.

I have not seen great ROI, but they have been okay. I think the major problem with Miva is their partner list. In most cases, you can pinpoint the poor quality traffic to a hand full of poor partners. Don't they realize that this is hurting them? Check out this site that allows people to rate Miva. Miva Rating (http://www.advertisingopinions.com/ao_miva.html)

I have been having trouble accessing the pages I want through google as I am constantly being re-directed to different sites, so I typed the number "67.29.139.199" into google i.e the number of the site which is redirecting me. My google search got me to this site eventually, after being redirected to various wine sites, Hotbot and sainsburys web site.
I am not quite sure what this forum is about, but noticed that someone mentioned that number is ABCsearch or something, anyway does anyone know how I can stop being contantly referred to other sites, it is so annoying even if I wanted the product I was being shown I would never buy it due to a referral from this ABCsearch nonsense.
Anyway any help appreciated.
Doigy

I'm with Goclick.com, and i don't understand why get no leads to any of my ads, even the ones that offer free things and money, it's not right. Something is fishy. When i had a ppc campaign set on a email marketing website of mine, there were conversion rates in Google Adsense, but those could easily be bots or people clicking the Adsense ads. When there are actually actions that have to performed, nothing happends, ever. It doesn't make sense.

Someone here wrote about ABCSearch, i just signed up with it today, luckily i made no deposit. Is this really whats going on ppc search engines? I can't withdraw my money from goclick.com, those thiefs.

For instance, i had an ad about free poker bankrolls at no cost ofcourse. When i advertise on p2p networks for instance, i get sales, and many. as soon as i started on goclick nothing happend, not one sale. The ad clearly stated, that only people with no ... account qualified for it, and yet i got dozens of clickthroughs in a very short amount of time, with no single lead. Is there anyone else who has this problem with goclick.com, and i do not mean with Adsense ads. How can these people get a away with such large scale fraud, they must have taken millions from advertisers a year. I mean several ppc search engines, not one.

We've used most of these engines in question including Miva, Kanoodle & Enhance and got similar lack of conversions. It's interesting these guys can deliver thousands of click visitors from sites we've never heard about. In tracing IP addresses we interestingly found many of their partners to be the same that we used for CPV campaigns.... which mirely pop the site based on keywords or category channels. We've paid $2-$4 cpm ($.002-$.004) for those... which are priced on "views" but have the same effect as "counting" as clicks since it loads the page of the site. These haven't really worked for us either. Although paying $.004 is a lot less than most of their $.05 minimums. My feeling is that's what these guys are doing to generate the high volume of traffic. Has anyone else come to this conclusion?

We use Looksmart which does contribute to conversions (in some cases) and they seem to keep a tight lease on their partners.

MJo

Just wanted to bump this thread. I have today documented for Miva/FindWhat almost $500 in fraudulent clicks in the last year generated from SearchHound and it's spyware. Just this morning I've documented (8) fraudulent "clicks" (remember, the click doesn't even occur) from the SearchHound toolbar. I have never generated 1 sale from FindWhat as compared with almost $400k from Google/Overture. I have demanded a refund of the $500 I paid them over a year ago and will let you know here whether I get it or not.

FindWhat/Miva PPC is 100% fraud!