It's actually quite trivial to determine which ad(s) brought in which sales.
You can use cookies, referring pages (very useful for picking up on specific search terms), separate entry pages for different accounts, etc.
So your widget business gets 30000 hits through GoogleAds but only 18 sales, your conversion rate is statistically nil. All is not lost though, you can look up what queries brought those visitors who became buyers. With such a small sample, this may not be of much use.
What would be extremely useful in that example would be the most common queries which delivered hits but not sales. You could then exclude your ad from displaying for similar queries in the future. That is, over the next similar period of time, even if you still only received 15-20 sales, if you also reduced your hits to 1200 or so, then you're getting much more bang for buck with a higher conversion ratio even though your sales are essentially flat.
Any civilization 45 light years away is currently watching broadcasts of "My Mother The Car." As a result, they've probably concluded that this planet must be destroyed for the survival of the galaxy.
I think the perfect object lesson as to why this is unlikely to happen very often is the
unvetted viral VW video. How's that for a daily dose of alliteration?
Ever notice those black hoses you'll drive over occassionally on the road. It's keeping count and track of the time. Ergo, a full record of how many vehicles pass and at what time. These have existed at least some 35+ years, quite probably more, and are still used today.
It shouldn't surprise you to know that the technology has improved since the advent of those devices. Such systems are mainly used at the government level to monitor traffic. But as in another recent thread such systems are rapidly becoming available to business and even consumer markets.
And that is precisely how the title of this thread applies. These casinos are offshore for one reason only: The US Govt. has made it absolutely clear that they will in no way sanction onine casinos operating within the US. In other words, there is no possible legal alternative right now.
If instead, the US (or better yet states such as Nevada and New Jersey) permitted online casinos to operate within their jurisdictions, had a gambling commission officer on duty at all times auditing the code and the play to make sure the games worked as advertised, insured that customer complaints were dealt with timely and fairly, and most of all taxed the casinos' profits then their would be no problem.
Half the online gambling market is within the US. These users would probably prefer to gamble in (even virtually) a domestic casino with oversight they could trust to be fully impartial. This increased traffic would probably more than offset the loss in revenue due to taxation a US-based casino would experience.
And talking about rigging the odds, state lotteries with 50% payouts are among the very worst bets out there. Yet these are legally sanctioned and heavily promoted by the government. Is that enough hypocrisy for you?
Many of the comments so far have been valid yet contradictory, not to mention many that are more or less out of date.
1) Being willing to experiment and try things out vs. not clicking on that pop-up or attachment.. This is made MUCH worse when all it takes for a computer to become riddled with spyware these days is simply an out of the box install of Windows and an internet connection.. Very likely have the root directory will be filled with trojans and the desktop with popup phishing schemes long before the "average" user can click on Windows Update, let alone find a site like grc.com.
2) More on that point. Sure, we can all laugh about how ridiculous the "Nigerian Finance Minister" type scams are, but many highly intelligent people have fallen for these ploys. Social Engineering would not remain a primary tool in the gray/black hat hacker's toolkit were it not so darn effective -- even when the target may very well have a Mensa level IQ. I have to admit, I've been in the the 'right' frame of mind at times to nearly buy into the MMF scams, thankfully the still small voice in my head was able to scream "NO!" enough to prevent me from falling all the way in, but let's just say I was on the edge of the pit and had banana peels under my feet.
3) Teaching a user how to program to become "computer literate" seems like overkill nowadays. Back in the age of the Apple II/C-64/Atari 400/etc. when you couldn't even load a store-bought game without rudimentary programming skills and definately not without RTFM at least once, it was essential. Now that programming one's computer for most users would entail purchasing Visual Basic or similar which is probably not available at Walmart and certainly not in the price range for the casual computer user, this just isn't realistic.
4) Moreover, nowadays monitors go into stand-by when the computer is turned off, the computer will frequently go into standby by default after a period of time, most connectors for computer peripherals are color coded to take the guesswork out of setting up a system.
Granted, I still hear people refer to their beige box as the "cpu" and talk about how much memory it has when they're clearly talking about hd capacity, same things I encountered from people 15 years ago, but computers have become a LOT more intuitive over the years, and I'm ever so grateful I will never again have to repeatedly instruct the same person how to format a 3.5 disk in MS-DOS 4.01!
But with the increased intuitiveness comes increased danger since RTFM is no longer an absolute requirement to find your way online. When wireless routers ship with WEP disabled and worse yet recommend that it be left disabled in the "Quick Start Guide" it isn't just the scammers who are out to prey on unsuspecting novices, it is the major hardware/software producers who want to keep their tech support overhead down to a bare minimum that are a big part of the problem as well.
Here's an opportunity then to respawn the whole shareware type distribution then and counterbalance the Wal-Mart squeeze on developer profits at the same time:
Go ahead and edit and censor the !crap out of your game until it gets Wally World's blessing. Let them squeeze every nickel out of your margin until you're barely breaking even.
Then publicize that users can pay an additional $12.95 to download the "unrated" update to the game. (IE the original intended release)
That way, the game that once sold for $50 at Software Etc, will now sell for $24.88 at Wal-Mart + 12.95 for the "upgrade" Or potential buyers can just get the full version online from the get-go for $29.99.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually quite trivial to determine which ad(s) brought in which sales.
You can use cookies, referring pages (very useful for picking up on specific search terms), separate entry pages for different accounts, etc.
So your widget business gets 30000 hits through GoogleAds but only 18 sales, your conversion rate is statistically nil. All is not lost though, you can look up what queries brought those visitors who became buyers. With such a small sample, this may not be of much use.
What would be extremely useful in that example would be the most common queries which delivered hits but not sales. You could then exclude your ad from displaying for similar queries in the future. That is, over the next similar period of time, even if you still only received 15-20 sales, if you also reduced your hits to 1200 or so, then you're getting much more bang for buck with a higher conversion ratio even though your sales are essentially flat.
Any civilization 45 light years away is currently watching broadcasts of "My Mother The Car." As a result, they've probably concluded that this planet must be destroyed for the survival of the galaxy.
I think the perfect object lesson as to why this is unlikely to happen very often is the unvetted viral VW video. How's that for a daily dose of alliteration?
Except for the fact that they probably signed away their right to sue in a binding arbitration clause.
Ever notice those black hoses you'll drive over occassionally on the road. It's keeping count and track of the time. Ergo, a full record of how many vehicles pass and at what time. These have existed at least some 35+ years, quite probably more, and are still used today.
It shouldn't surprise you to know that the technology has improved since the advent of those devices. Such systems are mainly used at the government level to monitor traffic. But as in another recent thread such systems are rapidly becoming available to business and even consumer markets.
And that is precisely how the title of this thread applies. These casinos are offshore for one reason only: The US Govt. has made it absolutely clear that they will in no way sanction onine casinos operating within the US. In other words, there is no possible legal alternative right now.
If instead, the US (or better yet states such as Nevada and New Jersey) permitted online casinos to operate within their jurisdictions, had a gambling commission officer on duty at all times auditing the code and the play to make sure the games worked as advertised, insured that customer complaints were dealt with timely and fairly, and most of all taxed the casinos' profits then their would be no problem.
Half the online gambling market is within the US. These users would probably prefer to gamble in (even virtually) a domestic casino with oversight they could trust to be fully impartial. This increased traffic would probably more than offset the loss in revenue due to taxation a US-based casino would experience.
And talking about rigging the odds, state lotteries with 50% payouts are among the very worst bets out there. Yet these are legally sanctioned and heavily promoted by the government. Is that enough hypocrisy for you?
Don't you mean the Pposter?
Many of the comments so far have been valid yet contradictory, not to mention many that are more or less out of date.
1) Being willing to experiment and try things out vs. not clicking on that pop-up or attachment.. This is made MUCH worse when all it takes for a computer to become riddled with spyware these days is simply an out of the box install of Windows and an internet connection.. Very likely have the root directory will be filled with trojans and the desktop with popup phishing schemes long before the "average" user can click on Windows Update, let alone find a site like grc.com.
2) More on that point. Sure, we can all laugh about how ridiculous the "Nigerian Finance Minister" type scams are, but many highly intelligent people have fallen for these ploys. Social Engineering would not remain a primary tool in the gray/black hat hacker's toolkit were it not so darn effective -- even when the target may very well have a Mensa level IQ. I have to admit, I've been in the the 'right' frame of mind at times to nearly buy into the MMF scams, thankfully the still small voice in my head was able to scream "NO!" enough to prevent me from falling all the way in, but let's just say I was on the edge of the pit and had banana peels under my feet.
3) Teaching a user how to program to become "computer literate" seems like overkill nowadays. Back in the age of the Apple II/C-64/Atari 400/etc. when you couldn't even load a store-bought game without rudimentary programming skills and definately not without RTFM at least once, it was essential. Now that programming one's computer for most users would entail purchasing Visual Basic or similar which is probably not available at Walmart and certainly not in the price range for the casual computer user, this just isn't realistic.
4) Moreover, nowadays monitors go into stand-by when the computer is turned off, the computer will frequently go into standby by default after a period of time, most connectors for computer peripherals are color coded to take the guesswork out of setting up a system.
Granted, I still hear people refer to their beige box as the "cpu" and talk about how much memory it has when they're clearly talking about hd capacity, same things I encountered from people 15 years ago, but computers have become a LOT more intuitive over the years, and I'm ever so grateful I will never again have to repeatedly instruct the same person how to format a 3.5 disk in MS-DOS 4.01!
But with the increased intuitiveness comes increased danger since RTFM is no longer an absolute requirement to find your way online. When wireless routers ship with WEP disabled and worse yet recommend that it be left disabled in the "Quick Start Guide" it isn't just the scammers who are out to prey on unsuspecting novices, it is the major hardware/software producers who want to keep their tech support overhead down to a bare minimum that are a big part of the problem as well.
That would never work. It would only result in that person surreptitiously ordering the Sims Ci@1i$ expansion pack for you.
Here's an opportunity then to respawn the whole shareware type distribution then and counterbalance the Wal-Mart squeeze on developer profits at the same time:
Go ahead and edit and censor the !crap out of your game until it gets Wally World's blessing. Let them squeeze every nickel out of your margin until you're barely breaking even.
Then publicize that users can pay an additional $12.95 to download the "unrated" update to the game. (IE the original intended release)
That way, the game that once sold for $50 at Software Etc, will now sell for $24.88 at Wal-Mart + 12.95 for the "upgrade" Or potential buyers can just get the full version online from the get-go for $29.99.
Teams are locked into cages secured by these bolts. Each with a PDA and an RF scanner. First team out wins and losers PWN'd?