The potential price of click throughs

One small business learnt a hard lesson about online click advertising when its bill rose from £150 to £17,000 in one weekend.

Payment for 'click advertising' is dependent on the number of 'click through' from a small advertisement, usually on the right hand side of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

The Times tells the story of a small financial services company, MEM Capital, who used this system by bidding 55p each for 'key words' which would trigger these advertisements.

Initially the bills came to between £100 and £150 a month. However, just before Easter the business changed the keywords that trigger these adverts - and that was when the problems started.

Overture, the company which provides the service, claimed that some of the pages submitted were blank, which meant that the payment then defaults to the highest bid for the term. So instead of paying 55p a click through, MEM Capital found itself paying around £7 for some terms.

During the Easter weekend, this ran up a total bill of £17,000.

Full article The £17,000 bill just a click away - Times