How to trick viewers into clicking your PPC ads

[headspin]

Basically, using this technique you can trick users into clicking PPC ads like adwords. It is a method to get around the fact that in JavaScript, for security reasons, you can't set the mouse position.

The idea is to make a silverlight control (here, a fake video player), where I have put code to hide the user's mouse cursor and replace it with a bitmap of a cursor. When he tries to play the fake video by moving his mouse towards the play button, the fake cursor moves towards the play button but his real cursor moves towards the ads (see the example below). He doesn't see the real cursor move because it is hidden by the script. When he hovers the button with the fake cursor, it lights up like a jack-o-lantern and he clicks it, but what he doesn't notice is that his real cursor was actually over an ad, and that the video player lighting up was just a diversion.

To see the technique in action, go to
hxxp://extremeupdates.1stfreehosting.com/Videos.htm

and try to view the (fake) video.

It doesn't work everytime (there are a few bugs I have to fix too). But it is certainly MUCH better than standard clickthrough rates.

Obviously, you don't have to use Silverlight to get this to work. Flash would do as well, and I'm sure you could even adapt it to work only using JavaScript. I used Silverlight because I am very familiar with the technology and it offers more flexibility.

 

[urbanzen]

Headspin, with this idea, can you test out with another new site, replacing your Adwords ad with popups, with "Free Ipod" zip submit offer gimmics? You may earn more than an adwords block this way.

Urban

 

[ty180sx]

dude this is what i see
Firefox 3.0.1

 

[headspin]

@ty180sx: You don't have the silverlight plugin so the page looks all weird. Maybe it has something to do with firefox. I'll look into it. Thanks for pointing it out.

@urbanzen: This idea won't work with a popup or anything that isn't on the same page. It may work with those layer ads, though...I'll have to see.

 

[Vrindavan]

i don't see any video

 

[headspin]

i don't see any video

Well obviously the video's fake. There should be something that looks like a video player though, or are you getting the same kind of thing that ty180x posted a screenshot of?

I think the problem may be that most users don't have the Silverlight plugin yet. Grrrr...

 

[abansb]

Are you going to post how to do this method? I see it says how to but don't see no how to

 

[Dan Free]

I see the exact same thing with I.E. 7.0. No video.

 

[todaydvd]

I see the same screen as ty180sx...

However, I think this is a good idea, it may high risk for using on Adwords, but may good for some CPA offer

 

[headspin]

Apologies to all of you who aren't seeing the fake video player. Getting Microsoft's Silverlight plugin should fix the problem in all cases if you have IE 6 or higher.

@abansb: The method goes like this:
1)Get free hosting and sign up for PPC account
2) Set up a page with a script like the one I put up (except you should do it in flash or pure javascript. I'm realizing this Silverlight thing was a bad idea)
3) Use youtube or forum spamming to drive traffic

As for the coding itself, if you have some programming experience it shouldn't be too hard.

 

[DeskCoder]

That is the HUGE problem with this technique, the visitor needs to have SilverLight intalled on their computer,

AND 99% OF VISITORS WILL NOT HAVE THIS INSTALLED

EDIT: Sorry, saw your #2 above.

So what do you do, hide the mouse, show a mouse.gif like 100 up and 100 right of your real mouse, and then place the ads accordingly?

 

[headspin]

I attached the code to this post in case anyone wants to try this out.

 

[headspin]

That is the HUGE problem with this technique,
So what do you do, hide the mouse, show a mouse.gif like 100 up and 100 right of your real mouse, and then place the ads accordingly?

As far as I know you can't explicitly hide the mouse in code. What you have to do is create an empty cursor and change the cursor to that. If you don't have one there's one in the same directory as the web page I posted at "/none.cur".

As to the placement of mouse.gif, have a look at the code I put in my previous post. That should give you an idea as to the algorithm I used to calculate the fake mouse position. To set the position, you can put mouse.gif in a div and then use javascript to set the position of this div. I haven't tried this in Javascript yet but that's how I would do it.

To replace the fake video player (the silverlight control everyone is having trouble loading), what you could do is have two pictures, one is the player before hovering the play button, one is the player while hovering the play button. Use javascript code based on the attached position algorithm to decide when to toggle the two.

For the placement of the ads, they can be anywhere, really, as you can see in the code I attached the algorithm takes as an input a target rectangle that specifies where the ads should be. I've only tested it with the ads to the top-left corner, though.

 

[CBernetic]

Can you replace silver light with a you (fake) player ?

 

[Vrindavan]

work for both IE and firefox ?

 

[Hardmaster]

Sorry,but it's a very crap idea Cost nothing.

 

[headspin]

Sorry,but it's a very crap idea Cost nothing.

The crap idea was to use silverlight to do it. You would think differently if the whole thing was in Javascript. Plus, since there is no way to programmatically click on a cross-site link whose URL you don't know, this is the closest you can get. But if you have a better idea, I'm all ears .

 

[headspin]

work for both IE and firefox ?

If done entirely in Javascript in the way I suggested to a previous poster, yeah, it would work in either since Firefox supports cursom cursors.

 

[headspin]

An update: Even with the Silverlight problem, here are the stats for the last 24 hours.
I used a youtube video to drive the traffic using a link in the description. The URL of the video, for those interested, is hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgIkIOr40cs. The result:

Youtube video views: 203
Page views: 56 (minus 23 that were me testing the page out)
PPC clicks: 11

Now I just have to rewrite everything in Javascript and scale it up .

 

[blanko]

Wouldn't you easily get banned from doing this?