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December 28, 2005
Click Fraud Seminar
Data Shaping Solutions - Market Strategies, Statistical Consulting
$895 before January 31st, 2006
$995 after January 31st, 2006
Seattle, February 24
San Francisco, March 10
Sponsored by AuthentiClick.net
Expensive but if you’re a big spender on Pay-Per-Click; I’m sure you would save a lot more money in the future and recoup that expense in no time.
Posted by dj at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2005
SOLD for $21 Million a Click Fraud Detection Firm
Think Partnership To Acquire Click Fraud Detection Firm
The deal calls for Think Partnership to pay $6.5 million in cash and $6.5 million in stock for Litmus. Earnout payments could push the value of the deal to $21 million.
Think Partnership CEO Gerard M. Jacobs stated, "This is an extremely significant acquisition for Think Partnership. Click fraud is a major problem for the advertising clients of the search engines and affiliate marketing networks. Click fraud currently is only dealt with after-the-fact, on an ad hoc complaints-made basis; it's a very unsatisfactory, expensive situation for advertisers. Litmus Media's technology changes the game dramatically. It identifies fraudulent clicks in real-time - 'in the clickstream', so to speak - and makes sure that advertisers aren't charged for those clicks. This gives advertisers a huge incentive to use Litmus' technology platform and to pay more for Litmus' pre-screened legitimate click stream. These higher advertiser payouts, in turn, are immensely attractive to website publishers who want to participate in Litmus' ValidClick Network. Both web publishers and advertisers profit from the technology, which explains why Litmus is so profitable and growing so rapidly."
Think Partership, with 11 operating companies including WebSourced, Inc, and KeywordRanking.com.
The Company expects Litmus to add more than $4 million of pre-tax income to the Company during 2006.
Posted by dj at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2005
"You know what this sounds like don't you? It sounds like the mob,"
AIT Weaves Tales Of Click Fraud Networks
The sheer number of fraud networks that register websites only to display sponsored links that are mechanically clicked...AIT CEO Clarence Briggs
This what John Battelle calls "Type In" Traffic Markets.
Google calls it Content Network,
Yahoo calls it Affiliate Network,
and AIT calls it Click Fraud.
Does this add value to Advertisers, customers, or just search engines and Traffic Marketers?
Posted by dj at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
As much as 29.5 percent PPC fraud
Entrepreneur.com's recent article discusses what needs to be done to help identify click fraud.....monitor, track, report, monitor....
Posted by dj at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2005
Look for click fraud to rise
iMedia Connection: The State of Search Today and Tomorrow
PPC continues to outpace traditional SEO. Look for click fraud to rise, as well as the proliferation of click fraud reconnaissance efforts. As long as the search engines aren't looking too closely at potential click fraud, companies are going to have to find it themselves. And why would the search engines look? Unless there's an obvious case, like maybe a couple thousand clicks coming from the same IP in India in one day, they don't mind taking your money. It wasn't very long ago that click fraud detection was a pretty obscure trend in search, but now a search of that phrase, in quotes, will yield nearly 40,000 results.
It's only going to get worse before it get's better....
Posted by dj at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
(Click Defense) started down the road and got cold feet
Google ad fraud plaintiff seeks to cut role in case
(Click Defense) started down the road and got cold feet....
It looks like ATI is taking over the lead in the class action lawsuit against Google.
WebPro News AIT Lashes Out At Click Fraud
...he's joined the class action suit in an effort to hold PPC engines accountable.
Click fraud suit changes hand The Register
Google click fraud plaintiff gets 'cold feet' ZDNet
Local company steps back in Google lawsuit The Coloradoan
Goodwill Credit
Read Yahoo! Search Marketing's partial email regarding a credit because of possible Click Fraud.
After carefully analyzing the click trail for your account, our Loss Prevention Team has determined that there were no unqualified clicks.Although there were no unqualified clicks charged to this account, as a goodwill gesture, we are happy to provide for you a goodwill credit of $1,451.42.
How would you feel if you got this letter after submitting a request for a credit?
Goodwill Gesture, it might have felt more like a goodwill gesture if I didn't have to send several emails asking for it.
Posted by dj at 01:17 AM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2005
It's the biggest threat to its business model
A interesting conversation with David Vise current author of The Google Story.
David Gardner: We've talked a lot about Google's strengths. What is one thing that Google doesn't do well, in your mind?
David Vise: I think one of the things that Google struggles with is a lack of sensitivity, I would call it, to its weaknesses and an unwillingness to acknowledge that it has weaknesses. The biggest single Achilles' heel in Google's entire system is something called click fraud. Click fraud involves people clicking away on ads on Google, which puts money in Google's coffers and costs advertisers money. But if somebody is clicking away on that and they don't have any intention of buying a product or researching a product, they may be doing it just to harm the competition. Or if they're a website owner or publisher and they're carrying Google ads, they may be clicking on it because they get eighty cents of every dollar and Google gets twenty cents.
So Google approaches this problem from almost a completely technological and engineering vantage point in trying to solve it. It's the biggest threat to its business model.
Currently, Google's ads perform so well that marketers build in the cost of click fraud and just have an understanding that this is going to be an ongoing problem, but they all complain when I talk to them that Google doesn't do enough and Google doesn't do as much as it claims to do in fighting click fraud.
Click Fraud In the Courts
What kind of information do the search engines collect to determine Click Fraud. Maybe these two lawsuits currently in the court system will help release that information.
Only time will tell.
Click fraud in the courts | News.blog | CNET News.com
Posted by dj at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)

