Pay Per Click (PPC) Management
Click Fraud and the importance of monitoring it
(No Ratings Yet)Filed under: Pay Per Click (PPC) Management by Nick @ 9:22 am
Click fraud is commonly known as a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising, when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a real user of the search results by clicking on an ad. This is because they want to increase the charges paid by advertisers. It is often said that it is the networks themselves that benefit from the fraud as they are the ones that eventually get the money from the advertisers if click fraud is taking place, this has led to increasing speculation about the integrity of big name brands such as Google and Yahoo!
Google and Yahoo are also said to be recycling ads on other network, these can range from the ones that we know about such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers get billed, sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from completely random locations. Google or Yahoo then shares the revenue with a chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly recycle ads.
The main source of click fraud around the world is pay per click, there are massive incentives in places like Google and Yahoo for advertisers to click on ads of competitors thus driving up their costs and potentially putting them out of business as they can not compete. And, competitors of publishers, some competitors wish to frame publishers, this can be effective as if the advertising networks believe that a publisher is clicking on its own ads to ensure traffic and high page rankings from the network, they may ban them from the network all together. If this is of a competitive nature, that is to say, if it is not the advertiser doing it but one of their competitors, this will free up space for them in the results.
Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed. Determined to prevent a backlash, the Internet ad titans say the extent of click fraud has been exaggerated, and they stress that they combat the problem vigorously. “We think click fraud is a serious but manageable issue,” says John Slade, Yahoo's senior director for global product management. “Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, the search engine's manager for trust and safety. “It's absolutely in our best interest for advertisers to have confidence in this industry.”
But no matter what they say advertiser’s confidence is slipping away. A Business Week investigation has revealed a thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult. “Paid to read” rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, “clickbot” software generates page hits automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they claim.
However policing is difficult, no one will disclose anything about what they think of click fraud, not a definition can be found, this is due to the worry that by giving away to much information the engines may give the users the ability to work out how they track it and so find ways of getting around it.
The solutions to the problem can come in many shapes and sizes but there are two which are the most commonly used. Forensic analysis of web server logs can take a look at the source and behavior of clicks; this however relies heavily on the honesty of middlemen. Third party corroboration is the more utilized option. With this you place single pixel images or JavaScript on the advertiser’s web pages and a suitable tagging of the ads. With this option the user may be presented with a cookie, the visitor’s information including, IP address and a user number which they are assigned is then collected and can be downloaded into a report for a specific time period.
Third party tracking does make it easier to identify fraud especially now Google lets you block specific IP addresses, and this information is much less likely to be tampered with than filtering web logs. This method however only works for single advertisers looking to decrease costs and will not track network activity, so due to the limited amount of traffic they receive when compared with middle men, they can be overly or less aggressive when judging fraud.
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A very good post, but I would like to highlight a point. You concentrate on competitor click fraud, but a large amount of click fraud is committed by content publishers taking part in the Adsense programme. Website owners receive a cut of advertising revenue, so they click through on their own ads or in the case of CPM advertising they create repeated impressions. I have investigated increasingly complex situations where proxy IP addresses are employed to click on ads.
[...] you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!PPC Click Fraud is the action of somebody clicking on your ads despite having no intention of visiting your site or [...]