Working with PPC engines here in Russia it is interesting to see how they compare with Google/Yahoo/MSN’s offerings. The main thing you notice is that Russian providers are falling over themselves to deal with the suspicions of companies and agencies here. Click fraud was an assumption here from day one.

This attitude means you get access to some metrics that US/UK/EU marketers can only dream of. For instance, Begun.ru, the second most popular PPC provider here gives you the exact time of click, the site URL where the click happened and the user’s IP.

Great for finding out which campaigns work best on which sites the ads are shown on and which show an unnatural amount of activity. Imagining being able to do that on Google’s Adwords affiliate network. Once we can drop advertisers which don’t perform and set up adverts for specific URL targets this would be damn near perfect.

For click fraud we can set up filters which alert us when the same IP crops up too often or when an unusual no. of clicks happen in a 5-10 minute time period.

We’re building PPC analytics software for the Russian market at the moment and we’re having a great time with the possibilities these metrics give us. Western PPC providers could do well having a look at what is happening in this market. Privacy issues aside, this transparency provided by the search engines here seems a very positive step.

I’m looking forward to attending the Internet and Business conference in Moscow this April to discuss what is coming next.

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