[A quick definition: SEM stands for "Search Engine Marketing", and in the context of this post it means paying to have a link to your site appear in, or next to, search results from search engines. You know those "Sponsored Results" that appear next to Google search results? That's SEM.]

Anyway, you start your new site, let's call it www.FlyFishingIsTotallySweet.com, because you know the entire world of fly fishermen will flock to read your posts, and you'll be a billionaire from all the ads they click on. You signup for AdSense, slap some ads on your site, and start blogging.

At the end of the first month you log in to your AdSense account and see that you've made a whopping 47 cents on ad clicks for the entire month. To add to your stress, your girlfriend's in the corner complaining that you never take here anywhere nice. You think it over and decide people must not be able to find your site yet, or else you'd surely be a billionaire already. So you decide to start using SEM to get traffic and readership.

You sign up for an AdWords account (afterall, Google's the best at everything right?) and bid on some keywords related to fly-fishing. A couple days later you check back in and see you've gotten almost no clicks from your ads. It turns out you didn't bid high enough on half of your keywords (i.e. "fishing"), and the other half of your keywords are too specific to get triggered (i.e. "come on man you gotta get into this fly fishing bidness it rocks"). You get rid of your non-triggering keywords, bite the bullet, and bid higher for the keywords "fishing" and "fly-fishing". Your girlfriend is just going to have to wait another month for that fancy dinner.

A week later you look back at your AdSense and see you've made $14. Sweet! Things are looking up. Take a quick peek over at AdWords, and...shit. $40 to AdWords for the traffic to your site. Now you're posting a $26 loss, and your girlfriend isn't getting any more patient.

Ok, well how smart can the folks at Google really be? That night, you turn off all of your AdWords campaigns, navigate to your site, and click on one of your ads. And then another. Click. Click. Click click click click click click click. And so on. A couple hours later you log in to AdSense and see that you've pulled in $100 in profits in the past few hours alone. How did you not think of this before?

The next morning, you wake up wondering how many times you'll be able to click your ads today. Before you can make it to your site, though, you notice an email in your inbox from the Google AdSense team. Dear Mr. Smith. Suspicious click activity on your site. Many successive clicks from the same IP address. 99% of payments to be rescinded. May have to suspend account if it happens again.

Ok, so that was stupid. You only made $1 total from all your clicks, and you certainly can't get away with that again. You email Google back telling them that one of your friends must have been messing with you and you'll be more careful going forward. You call your friend and start complaining about your predicament. Your girlfriend hasn't put out in months and she's been having some suspicious conversations with the mailman recently. You need to make some cash, quick.

"Dude, Russia!" your friend tells you.

"What the hell are you talking about?" you ask.

"Dude, in Russia, people sit around all day and just click on ads man. You can pay them to do that to your site, and then Google can never track it because it's like thousands of people doing it."

"Really? Russia?"

"Or like, Ukraine, or Slovakia, or something...here, check out this website..."

He sends you the link to a foreign website with some broken English on it. The site seems to be promising clicks on the ads on your site from thousands of different users. It's pretty cheap too, so you decide to give it a go. You reluctantly put your credit card number in, submit your website's url, and wait.

The next day, your AdSense shows an income of $200. The day after it's another $200. You're only paying the foreign website $100 a day, so this is starting to pay off pretty well. You pick up some flowers for your girlfriend. She rolls her eyes and tosses them on the table. "I want some new earrings," she says. That's cool, you think. You'll be able to afford that soon.  You may have abandoned actually adding posts about fly-fishing to your site at this point, but goddamn it, you're making money.

Things seem good for a few more days, but then you get another email from Google. That's never good. It looks like you have another problem with traffic. More suspicious traffic patterns. 70% of clicks determined to be fraudulent. Will be revoking funds in accordance. You spend $500 on traffic for the past week, but now you're only made $300 from AdSense. You're posting another $200 loss.

Damn, those folks at Google are pretty smart. You call your friend again. This was his idea, wasn't it?

"What were you thinking?" you ask. "Google is kicking my ass here."

Your friend chuckles. "Dude, quit messing with Google, they're too smart," he tells you. "There are lots of other ad-providers who won't be able to track your clicks like that."

You start doing some research, and come across www.NotTheSmartestAdProvider.com. They're site looks like it was put together by a couple 4th-graders. They don't pay quite as much as Google, but it doesn't look like they'll be tracking you quite as closely. You swap out your AdSense ads for these ads and turn back on the shady traffic from Russiakrainavakia.

Now you're spending $100 a day and pulling in $150...not as good as the $200 a day from Google, but not too bad either. You nervously wait until the end of the month in case NotTheSmartestAdProvider is going to pull some of your funds from "suspcioius traffic." But they don't. They are running a cheap shop and aren't monitoring the traffic quality they provide in the same way Google does, so you're able to slip under their radar with no trouble. You get your check for about $5000 at the end of the month, and put against your $100/day costs, you pulled in about $2000 this month alone! You take your girlfriend to the Caribbean for a weekend, she tells off the mailman, and all is well. The next month you buy double the traffic, pull in twice as much money, and things are great.

It doesn't much matter how the story goes from there. We'll say you buy your girlfriend a Ferrari, she leaves you for the mailman anyway, and you sit at on your fly-fishing boat with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a wad of cash in the other every day until your 60, all the while raking in cash from your site, at which point the feds come knocking at your door asking about internet fraud.

Exciting, right? But not really. Because the kicker to this story is that you are not who I've been saying you are.

You are actually a decent guy who built a website called www.FlyFishingFunTimes.com, and to drive some traffic to your site, you decided to use www.NotTheSmartestAdProvider.com because they're pretty cheap. Little do you know that all of that traffic is coming from a network of spammers living in Eastern Europe, courtesy of everyone's friend over at www.FlyFishingIsTotallySweet.com, where your ads happen to be running. So now all the traffic that's clicking on the affiliate offers and advertisements on your site is crap traffic, traffic that will never, ever, purchase anything.  So you're wasting money, possibly getting yourself into trouble with your affiliates and advertisers, and you didn't even do anything wrong...just signed up with a below-average traffic-provider.

The moral of this story is the following: your SEM traffic is only as good as your traffic-provider's ability to verify the quality of that traffic. If they are letting spammy traffic through, even if it's not on purpose, then it will be costing you money and potentially relationships with affiliates and advertisers.