Internet publishers are warned to be careful with the program Bidvertiser. We’ve been experimenting with them over the last 6 months and so far the earnings have been very poor, but more about that subject a bit further in the article. The one thing that has been discovered is that Bidvertiser is hiding cloaked links on publishers sites. The way they are doing this is through use of the <noscript> tag in each Bidvertiser advertising block. We noticed a discrepency when one ad block we have in rotation had a link to Bidvertiser in a <noscript> bock that had the anchor text “Marketing” and another had the anchor text “Affiliate Program”. This shows they know they are using the black hat cloaking technique and that they are specifically targeting keywords based on the site the ads will be published on. Furthermore, the use of a <noscript> block in their javascript ad code is useless from a publishers perspective, however, a search engine spider will pick up the links in the <noscript> section and interpert them as a backlink. If Bidvertiser were doing this in a legitimate manner (for which there is no reason to begin with) they would add a nofollow tag to the link but they are not doing so.
This is not the only manner in which Bidvertiser is dishonest. As far as impressions, clicks and earnings per click, they are also cheating publishers and the word is getting out on all of the important webmaster forums. After reading numerous complaints, we decided to do an experiment of our own and we placed Bidvertiser on a few selected subpages on one of our highest traffic websites. Those subpages normally account for 1000+ pageviews per day when Adsense code, AdBrite, or Ads-Click code is placed on them. We also placed a Commission Junction (who is known for accurate tracking) ad block onthe same page as the Bidvertiser. Well, the Bidvertiser impression count was significantly lower than the Commission Junction count. If Bidvertiser can’t accurately track impressions, how on earth can they track clicks accurately. Secondly, Bidvertiser claims to allow the publisher to set their own pricing for clicks by choosing to “Manually approve ads”. When you manually approve ads, you are shown the ad and the CPC (cost per click) and are asked to approve or reject the ads. Iin our experiment, we selected only high priced ads, that had a value over$0.50 per click. The pages we tested on delivered a mere 5 clicks for 19,282 impressions with an earnings of $0.24 and a measley 0.03% CTR. The overall CPC was $0.05, but if we set our minimum CPC at $0.50, what happened? Evidently manually approving ads doesn’t work or Bidvertiser is just dishonest and cheating publishers.
The final straw with Bidvertiser is their referral program. We have been displaying the “Join Bidvertiser” banners on several sites for a number of months now and we have over 400 clicks (although our click-off tracking script says closer to 4,000 clicks) and only 3 signups. This is a blatant dishonest accounting on Bidvertisers part because I can personally name at least 10 bloggers and webmasters who have signed up to Bidvertiser through our referral links because of my activity at DigitalPoint and Code4Gold forums.
As of this post, we are currently removing Bidvertiser from all of our sites and giving them a bigh thumbs down for their dishonesty. It would be nice if there were more legitimate, honest affiliate programs out there that didn’t cheat, lie to or steal from publishers but for the most part, the majority of PPC networks are nothing but con games. Either a publisher gets banned right before they get paid or they get cheated and lied to.
