January 05, 2006
How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet
Another mention of Who'sClickingWho, Wired writes another article about Click Fraud and how it could really take down google and it's advertisers.
Wired 14.01: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet
And AGoTOGuys comments about this article as he helps the author with some details.
Posted by dj at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2005
Search Engine Guide mentions WhosClickingWho for Click Fraud Protection
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Management
Click Fraud
Click fraud exists at every search engine. What is click fraud? According to a recent article by Duncan Parry about click fraud at Pay Per Click Analyst,
"Click fraud occurs when a pay per click advertising link is clicked on for a malicious reason – in other words, by somebody (or a piece of software) that isn’t interested in the products, services on content the advertiser’s website." There are several types of click fraud, including affiliate fraud, competitor fraud, and unintentional "fraud".
Each PPC search engine generally has a dedicated team of employees that are constantly watching for fraud in their system. However, that doesn't mean that every PPC search engine will catch every instance of click fraud. But watching the traffic to your website on a regular basis by reviewing your website statistics, you should be able to identify inconsistencies when they arise. There are several companies that deal directly with click fraud issues—they work with you to recover money from the PPC search engines if and when fraudulent clicks exist. Some of these pay per click audit firms include:
Posted by dj at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2005
Kanoodle and Click Fraud
Here is story of John Cunningham and his experience with computer generated clicks and Kanoodle a 2nd / 3rd tier PPC Search Engine.
Kanoodle and Click Fraud
Click fraud is a virus which has spread for years in the online advertising industry. As advertising payment systems grew from per click to CPM or commissions, click fraud seemed to be on the low for a couple of years. Enter paid search network distribution and contextual advertising and the net world was introduced to a new form of click fraud from numerous sources.
Yahoo and Google both claim they are stopping click fraud in its path with technical security measures and prosecution. But when a search marketing company takes its campaigns beyond Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask to companies like Lycos, Findwhat, Looksmart, Searchfeed and MyGeek; it is only natural for such marketers to worry about fraudulent clicks. Hence the formation of Click Fraud monitoring services like Who's Clicking Who and Keyword Max.
Enter Kanoodle. I spoke with John Cunningham of Hamptons Bride Magazine earlier this year about a piece he printed on Kanoodle and click fraud. I would have probably not even paid much attention to the piece had I not extended a proven search marketing campaign to Kanoodle for one week, and experienced not-so-pleasent results. Below is a shocking first-hand tale of one companies experience with Kanoodle and click fraud.
Are we saying that Kanoodle is suspect of committing click fraud? I'm not the technical authority to answer such a question and will let the readers of this piece decide for yourselves. The following is John Cunningham's story of his experience with Kanoodle and computer generated clicks.
Over the last few months we have been using multiple avenues of internet marketing including Overture and Adwords. Our positive results with the two companies made me search for other PPC programs. I stumbled across an ad on GoDaddy.com for Kanoodle.com and seen the cpc was less than the two major search engines and decided to give it a try.I was extremely impressed my first day up seeing the amount of traffic I was getting by logging into my account and with the lower cost was getting more traffic than from Google and Yahoo's programs. We are very meticulous when it comes to tracking our readers and use this information daily to make sure we are not only giving our readers what they want but also giving our Advertisers the results that they need.
After reviewing our stats we noticed a HUGE problem with the clicks coming from the Kanoodle network. 100% of all traffic coming from them stayed for a whole ZERO seconds. Our readers stay over the last few months has averaged around 2.5 minutes and up to 4 to 6 hours. At first I thought maybe it was because we were new to the network and gave them the benefit of the doubt, but as days passed the results were the same; not a single click from Kanoodle ever had a visit length over Zero seconds. How is this possible?
You would think that they would get lucky at least once and have one click through stay at least 2 seconds to read our splash page before they exited. It is our conclusion that Kanoodle is completely computer generated clicks, not human generated. I am writing this hoping others will read and not be Kanoodled as I was. As an online business I understand the importance of generating traffic to our website and find it very discouraging that such blatant deceit would come from what I thought was a legitimate company. I will be posting our stat results for you to view and you can come to your own conclusions.
Here are the results generated from Statcounter.com. I have highlighted the clicks coming from Kanoodle and underlined the ones from google and yahoo. You will also see 90% of the traffic generated from kanoodle happens from 12am to 2am. We do not get any traffic from them during the day. Be sure to read the last two pages so you can see what our normal traffic looks like...
Read John's further experience with Kanoodle in "Kanoodle Follow Up"
Posted by - Loren Baker, Editor @ 7:17 am
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2235
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2005
Who's Clicking Who on WebmasterRadio SES Wrap-Up
Who's Clicking Who speaks on the WebMasterRadio show. The archive Podcast is available here. On the 61st minute of the 75 minute broadcast they interview Brian Boockholdt of Who's Clicking Who.
Below are the details about the Radio show.
WebmasterRadio.FM to Air Exclusive Search Engine Strategies Conference Wrap-Up Radio Special
The live special will discuss the features and highlights of August's Search Engine Strategies conference, the largest and most important conference dedicated to the search engine and search engine marketing industries.
Fort Lauderdale, FL (PRWEB) September 1, 2005 -- WebmasterRadio.FM, a free, 24/7, internet business radio network, announces an exclusive "wrap-up" radio special covering the highlights of the Search Engine Strategies conference held August 8-11 in San Jose, California. The SES "wrap-up" radio special will be broadcast live, Friday, September 2, 2005 at 10 a.m. EST on http://www.WebmasterRadio.FM and will also be available in Podcast format.
The exclusive special will provide insight into this month's hugely successful Search Engine Strategies conference, including seminar highlights and after-show tips.
The SES "wrap-up" radio special will be hosted by Search Engine Strategies Conference Chair and Organizer, Danny Sullivan; Brandy Shapiro-Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM; and Sarah MacKay, also known as Ms. Write of WebmasterRadio.FM.
The exclusive radio special will provide information and tips to both conference participants and those interested in further involving themselves in the search engine community. Interviews with trade show contributors and exhibitors will help to unravel the SES experience and provide what attendees "need to know" to maximize this month's event.
"After the dust settles from an event like this, it's important to get a good perspective on what you learned and what you will take with you," explained Brandy Shapiro-Babin, WebmasterRadio.FM's Vice President of Marketing. "This month's Search Engine Strategies conference was a huge hit, and our radio special will enable participants to get the most out of their experience."
Special guest interviews will include Monte Cahn, CEO of Moniker.com; James Speer, Vice President Marketing and Products, IAC Advertising Solutions/AskJeeves and the Vice President from Who's Clicking Who.
About WebmasterRadio.FM
WebmasterRadio.FM strives to lift the "veiled curtain" of the Internet to bring the business community together through an interactive radio network. Its listeners are a global group comprised of everyone from corporate executives and decision makers to individuals who work for themselves, small and mid-sized businesses to those just starting out. The WebmasterRadio.FM listening audience has a vast appeal to anyone looking to learn industry-specific information from the most successful marketers and technology experts in the world. These Internet "influencers" create, learn and listen in a true community destination.
New and archived online business radio shows are now available in podcast format on WebmasterRadio.FM's re-designed Web site. To tune into WebmasterRadio.FM's live content, or to check out the show lineup, please visit www.webmasterradio.fm.
Media Contact:
Brandy Shapiro-Babin
303-882-5246
# # #
Press Releases for September 1, 2005
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/9/emw279745.htm
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2005
What Is Click Fraud?
Click fraud refers to illegitimate clicks on a pay-per-click ad that result in increasing the cost of advertising but return no benefit to the advertiser.
Who Commits Click Fraud and Why?
The culprits could be competitors that want you to overspend on advertising or skew search results. Every dollar you spend on useless advertising is a dollar off your bottom line. And if you have set a daily spend limit for your PPC ads, every fraudulent click dilutes that limit. Also, as your daily budget is used up, your ads can sink lower in the rankings.
Another source of click fraud is unscrupulous affiliates who make money from click-throughs. These affiliates sign up for a program where they are compensated per click-through to your site. If they send you legitimate customers it can be a win-win deal. But the dishonest ones can generate a large number fake clicks.
How Do They Do It?
Click fraud can be automated or manual. It can be as simple as a rival occasionally clicking on competitor ads just to push his advertising costs up. But click fraud schemes can be sophisticated as well. A common method is to use online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links. A growing alternative uses low-cost workers in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads. These fraudulent clicks are harder to trace because they can be spread across a large network.
How Can You Protect Yourself Against Click Fraud?
Web analytics companies are beginning to address the problem with their software. Urchin, for example, includes a Click Fraud Module that identifies repeat clickers by IP address and then does a WHOIS lookup.
But if your Web statistics package is unable to identify fraud, there are other services that can help you. ClickLab and Whosclickingwho, for example, make identifying and deterring click fraud their focus. They are available by monthly subscription. Both apply a statistical scoring algorithm to identify potential fraud. Reports can then be used to request refunds from the search engines and/or reevaluate search terms. A tactic used by both to deter fraud is to display a message to anyone that clicks through repeatedly. Whosclickingwho's is called the "ClickMinder," and reads like this:
"Your internet location has been detected visiting this site more than 5 times via links from one or more pay-per-click search engines. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you and thank you for your visits. To protect our customers from higher prices by keeping advertising dollars down, we routinely examine recurrent visitations from PPC Search Engines. Please help us pass the savings on to you by bookmarking our site for future reference. Thank you for visiting and please enjoy browsing our site!"
This is polite enough not to alienate legitimate clickers, but likely to deter at least amateur fraudsters.
For more information, read ClickLab's free white paper,"How To Protect Your Website Against Click Fraud.
More Click Fraud Resources
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/seo/a/clickfraud.htm
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
Web Startups Vie To Detect 'Click Fraud'
To attract clients, Law Offices of James Sokolove, a firm based in Newton, Mass., spends more than $100,000 a month advertising on Web-search sites. But early this year, it decided Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. weren't adequately addressing its suspicion that outsiders were maliciously clicking on its ads to drive up its search-ad bills.
So in March, the law firm hired Clicklab LLC, paying the 11-person McLean, Va., company hundreds of dollars a month to try to root out the problem. The law firm is among an increasing number of advertisers seeking help from a new set of companies that have popped up to tackle "click fraud," a term the industry uses to describe someone clicking on a Web-search ad with ill intent.
Like hundreds of thousands of other advertisers, the Sokolove firm contracts with Yahoo and Google to serve up small text ads to anyone searching the Web using certain words, such as "Vioxx" or "mesothelioma," a rare form of asbestos-linked cancer. The firm, which has affiliates throughout the country, pays the search companies a fee each time someone clicks on one of its ads. Amid heated bidding with other advertisers, primarily personal-injury law firms, for "mesothelioma," it paid around $100 a click last year.
The search-ad market is estimated at around $4 billion in the U.S. in 2004, and the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from search and similar keyword-triggered Web-site ads. But there is increasing evidence that some people are clicking on such ads either to run up fees for competitors, to boost the placement of their own ads or to make money for themselves.
The Web-search companies concede that click fraud is an issue but decline to quantify its scope; some outside estimates run as high as 20% of all clicks. Many companies complain that Google, Yahoo and other search engines are vague about how they are tackling the problem, unresponsive to questions about suspect clicks and ineffective when advertisers point out possible abuses.
E-magine Networks Inc., which spent about $500,000 on Google ads in the past 12 months, says it recently received about $15,000 in credits from Google for "invalid clicks." The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Web-site operator believes click fraud has cost it more than that. So it recently had a start-up company called ClickFacts put some computer code on its Web sites to help track clicks.
Other advertisers have taken the issue to court. Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC, a Texarkana, Ark., retailer, in February filed suit in Miller County, Ark., circuit court against several search companies. The suit, which was joined by another advertiser, alleges that search companies knowingly charged for fraudulent clicks.
Sensing a business opportunity, entrepreneurs have built up a cottage industry to capitalize on search-advertiser discontent. Their services, with names such as Click Defense, ClickDetective and WhosClickingWho, generally monitor records of visitors who come to their clients' Web sites via search ads. To sniff out fraudsters, they rely on such clues as the numerical addresses that computers provide when they connect. Advertisers can take that information to the search companies to request credits to their ad budgets for fraudulent clicks.
"The market has certainly become flooded with people in this space," says Skip Pratt, general manager of PPCTrax.com, a unit of closely held Oliver Tucker Partners LLC. The Chandler, Ariz., Internet services and consulting company started its service to combat click fraud in January, after wrestling with the problem when it affected its own search advertising. It says it has about 35 clients.
Google and Yahoo acknowledge the miniboom in click-fraud services and say they are open to working with such third parties in attempting to address the issue. The information in advertisers' Web-site records "is useful to help them identify patterns," says John Slade, a senior director for product management at Yahoo's search-ad arm. He says Yahoo itself has considered providing Web-site traffic analysis similar to that offered by the third parties.
Both search companies decline to comment on specific customer complaints. "We take all incidents seriously and we make every effort to investigate each one quickly and communicate effectively with the customers," says Salar Kamangar, a Google product-management director.
Yahoo and Google each has its own complex system, honed over time, that aims to spot click fraud before an advertiser is charged. But, citing privacy issues and a desire not to alert fraudsters to the surveillance techniques, the search engines generally won't provide advertisers with details about how they handle specific suspect clicks. That can make it hard to reconcile analyses performed by third-party services with what clicks the advertiser paid for.
Advertisers on their own can monitor the effectiveness of their ads by using free services from the search companies that help determine what portion of clicks generates customer sales. They also can scour the records kept by their own Web servers. But small advertisers in particular often say they don't have the time or technical expertise to hunt for traces of click fraud with those tools.
Andrew Sweet, Web manager for the Sokolove law offices, says he tried poring over the company's Web logs but found it inefficient and inconclusive. Enter Clicklab. In evaluating each search-ad click, Clicklab examines over 30 factors, such as the country where the visitor appears to be located and the length of time spent on a client's site. Its service, inaugurated in March, starts at $100 a month.
Mr. Sweet says Clicklab's analysis suggests that only about 2% of the clicks on the law firm's search ads are fraudulent. Still, he believes the detection service is worth it, if only for peace of mind.
Scott Karr turned to a third-party service for similar reasons. The president of Karr Group First LLC, an online home-appraisal concern, suspects a competitor is clicking on his Google search ads to try to drain his ad budget. He recently estimated his total bill for fraudulent clicks was about $6,000. Google refunded the closely held Reynoldsburg, Ohio, company $360 for "invalid clicks."
Mr. Karr says that when he discussed the matter with Google staff, they wouldn't say what else, if anything, Google is doing about his problem. So he signed up for WhosClickingWho in April, paying a $79 monthly fee. When someone clicks multiple times on the same search ad, the service displays on that person's screen a pop-up message indicating it is tracking him or her. It also provides detailed reports advertisers can use to request refunds from ad providers. Mr. Karr recently challenged Google's billing based on WhosClickingWho data. Google replied in an email that it didn't find evidence of click fraud and that there could be a problem with the third-party service's numbers. Mr. Karr says he's sticking with the service, but now has some doubts about its value.
WhosClickingWho is a service of closely held PPC Audit Inc., a 12-person Santa Clara, Calif., company. President John Carreras launched the service in 2002 after business rivals repeatedly clicked on search ads he bought for his trade-show display business. He says WhosClickingWho now has a few hundred customers. With click-fraud detection booming, he sold his trade-show business earlier this year.
Click-fraud detection has even spread to university campuses. Mikhail Ledvich, who is 20 years old and just completed his sophomore year at Boston University, is starting a service called ClickFacts with two other Russian-born college students during their school vacation this summer. A venture-capital group is providing financial backing and advice.
Email your comments to sjeditor@dowjones.com.
--June 10, 2005
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal.
From The Wall Street Journal Online
http://www.startupjournal.com/ecommerce/ecommerce/20050610-delaney.html
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)
Web Startups Vie To Detect 'Click Fraud'
To attract clients, Law Offices of James Sokolove, a firm based in Newton, Mass., spends more than $100,000 a month advertising on Web-search sites. But early this year, it decided Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. weren't adequately addressing its suspicion that outsiders were maliciously clicking on its ads to drive up its search-ad bills.
So in March, the law firm hired Clicklab LLC, paying the 11-person McLean, Va., company hundreds of dollars a month to try to root out the problem. The law firm is among an increasing number of advertisers seeking help from a new set of companies that have popped up to tackle "click fraud," a term the industry uses to describe someone clicking on a Web-search ad with ill intent.
Like hundreds of thousands of other advertisers, the Sokolove firm contracts with Yahoo and Google to serve up small text ads to anyone searching the Web using certain words, such as "Vioxx" or "mesothelioma," a rare form of asbestos-linked cancer. The firm, which has affiliates throughout the country, pays the search companies a fee each time someone clicks on one of its ads. Amid heated bidding with other advertisers, primarily personal-injury law firms, for "mesothelioma," it paid around $100 a click last year.
The search-ad market is estimated at around $4 billion in the U.S. in 2004, and the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from search and similar keyword-triggered Web-site ads. But there is increasing evidence that some people are clicking on such ads either to run up fees for competitors, to boost the placement of their own ads or to make money for themselves.
The Web-search companies concede that click fraud is an issue but decline to quantify its scope; some outside estimates run as high as 20% of all clicks. Many companies complain that Google, Yahoo and other search engines are vague about how they are tackling the problem, unresponsive to questions about suspect clicks and ineffective when advertisers point out possible abuses.
E-magine Networks Inc., which spent about $500,000 on Google ads in the past 12 months, says it recently received about $15,000 in credits from Google for "invalid clicks." The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Web-site operator believes click fraud has cost it more than that. So it recently had a start-up company called ClickFacts put some computer code on its Web sites to help track clicks.
Other advertisers have taken the issue to court. Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC, a Texarkana, Ark., retailer, in February filed suit in Miller County, Ark., circuit court against several search companies. The suit, which was joined by another advertiser, alleges that search companies knowingly charged for fraudulent clicks.
Sensing a business opportunity, entrepreneurs have built up a cottage industry to capitalize on search-advertiser discontent. Their services, with names such as Click Defense, ClickDetective and WhosClickingWho, generally monitor records of visitors who come to their clients' Web sites via search ads. To sniff out fraudsters, they rely on such clues as the numerical addresses that computers provide when they connect. Advertisers can take that information to the search companies to request credits to their ad budgets for fraudulent clicks.
"The market has certainly become flooded with people in this space," says Skip Pratt, general manager of PPCTrax.com, a unit of closely held Oliver Tucker Partners LLC. The Chandler, Ariz., Internet services and consulting company started its service to combat click fraud in January, after wrestling with the problem when it affected its own search advertising. It says it has about 35 clients.
Google and Yahoo acknowledge the miniboom in click-fraud services and say they are open to working with such third parties in attempting to address the issue. The information in advertisers' Web-site records "is useful to help them identify patterns," says John Slade, a senior director for product management at Yahoo's search-ad arm. He says Yahoo itself has considered providing Web-site traffic analysis similar to that offered by the third parties.
Both search companies decline to comment on specific customer complaints. "We take all incidents seriously and we make every effort to investigate each one quickly and communicate effectively with the customers," says Salar Kamangar, a Google product-management director.
Yahoo and Google each has its own complex system, honed over time, that aims to spot click fraud before an advertiser is charged. But, citing privacy issues and a desire not to alert fraudsters to the surveillance techniques, the search engines generally won't provide advertisers with details about how they handle specific suspect clicks. That can make it hard to reconcile analyses performed by third-party services with what clicks the advertiser paid for.
Advertisers on their own can monitor the effectiveness of their ads by using free services from the search companies that help determine what portion of clicks generates customer sales. They also can scour the records kept by their own Web servers. But small advertisers in particular often say they don't have the time or technical expertise to hunt for traces of click fraud with those tools.
Andrew Sweet, Web manager for the Sokolove law offices, says he tried poring over the company's Web logs but found it inefficient and inconclusive. Enter Clicklab. In evaluating each search-ad click, Clicklab examines over 30 factors, such as the country where the visitor appears to be located and the length of time spent on a client's site. Its service, inaugurated in March, starts at $100 a month.
Mr. Sweet says Clicklab's analysis suggests that only about 2% of the clicks on the law firm's search ads are fraudulent. Still, he believes the detection service is worth it, if only for peace of mind.
Scott Karr turned to a third-party service for similar reasons. The president of Karr Group First LLC, an online home-appraisal concern, suspects a competitor is clicking on his Google search ads to try to drain his ad budget. He recently estimated his total bill for fraudulent clicks was about $6,000. Google refunded the closely held Reynoldsburg, Ohio, company $360 for "invalid clicks."
Mr. Karr says that when he discussed the matter with Google staff, they wouldn't say what else, if anything, Google is doing about his problem. So he signed up for WhosClickingWho in April, paying a $79 monthly fee. When someone clicks multiple times on the same search ad, the service displays on that person's screen a pop-up message indicating it is tracking him or her. It also provides detailed reports advertisers can use to request refunds from ad providers. Mr. Karr recently challenged Google's billing based on WhosClickingWho data. Google replied in an email that it didn't find evidence of click fraud and that there could be a problem with the third-party service's numbers. Mr. Karr says he's sticking with the service, but now has some doubts about its value.
WhosClickingWho is a service of closely held PPC Audit Inc., a 12-person Santa Clara, Calif., company. President John Carreras launched the service in 2002 after business rivals repeatedly clicked on search ads he bought for his trade-show display business. He says WhosClickingWho now has a few hundred customers. With click-fraud detection booming, he sold his trade-show business earlier this year.
Click-fraud detection has even spread to university campuses. Mikhail Ledvich, who is 20 years old and just completed his sophomore year at Boston University, is starting a service called ClickFacts with two other Russian-born college students during their school vacation this summer. A venture-capital group is providing financial backing and advice.
Email your comments to sjeditor@dowjones.com.
--June 10, 2005
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal.
From The Wall Street Journal Online
http://www.startupjournal.com/ecommerce/ecommerce/20050610-delaney.html
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2005
Where did all the ads go?
Pay per click fraud has been a hot topic in 2005. With rising concerns about how vast and wide it's affects are companies like VeriClix, Click Sentinel and Who's Clicking Who have sprung up over night. One of the biggest concerns is that with all this revenue flowing in through ads how do you monitor what's legit and what is fraud. You need thresholds that can be set.
Allowing the Search Engine / Pay Per Click companies to internally audit and set spam thresholds is a conflict of interests. What they deem as "tolerable fraud" translates into Millions of dollars added to their bottom line. That's Millions in stolen money out of your pocket.
So what is the solution? Well right now it's at a stale mate. Search Engines and PPC companies are quickly adding addendums to their TOS clauses which rule out fraud data from a 3rd party source. So essentially this means that that PPC companies are auditing themselves. This would be like letting Enron or Worldcom audit their own holdings.
With the rise of fame of all these start up PPC auditing companies Adwords, Yahoo Internet Marketing and the other PPC companies have got to be feeling the heat. Just recently Google Adwords stopped the PPC ads for click fraud terms in their results. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg and is a good assurance that they are feeling the heat. I wouldn't be surprised to see more fraud related headlines before the year is out.
This post was posted on June 9, 2005
http://www.seo-e.com/item-77.htm
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)
'Click Fraud' Costly to Search Engine Advertisers
As many as 20 percent of all "clicks" on Web-search site ads are fraudulent – and those false clicks can cost an advertiser plenty.
Companies pay search firms such as Google and Yahoo a fee each time someone clicks on one of their ads, and a single click can cost $100.
But some people are maliciously clicking on ads to drive up competitors' bills.
"Click fraud" refers to the practice of "clicking on pay-per-click ads without the intent to buy advertisers' products or services," according to Clicklab LLC, a company that helps advertisers fight click fraud.
"It can be perpetrated by persons who systemically click on links, or use software to do so, to either garner profit for themselves through click commissions or to purposefully deplete the pay-per-click funds of a competitor."
The search-ad market is estimated at about $4 billion annually in the U.S.
"The Web-search companies concede that click fraud is an issue but decline to quantify its scope," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"Some outside estimates run as high as 20 percent of all clicks. Many companies complain that Google, Yahoo and other search engines are vague about how they are tackling the problem and unresponsive to questions about suspect clicks."
A Texarkana, Ark., retailer, Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC filed a lawsuit against several search engine companies, alleging the firms knowingly charged for fraudulent clicks. Other companies have turned to Clicklab and other anti-click-fraud services such as ClickDetective and WhosClickingWho for help.
To sniff out fraud, Clicklab examines more than 30 factors, such as the length of time spent on a client's site.
With WhosClickingWho, the service detects when someone has clicked on an ad multiple times and sends a pop-up message to the culprit warning that the service is tracking him.
Most important, the services provide reports that advertisers can use to negotiate refunds from search companies for the fraudulent clicks.
Thursday, June 9, 2005 3:24 p.m. EDT
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/6/9/155403.shtml
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 03:24 AM | Comments (0)
'Click Fraud' Costly to Search Engine Advertisers
As many as 20 percent of all "clicks" on Web-search site ads are fraudulent – and those false clicks can cost an advertiser plenty.
Companies pay search firms such as Google and Yahoo a fee each time someone clicks on one of their ads, and a single click can cost $100.
But some people are maliciously clicking on ads to drive up competitors' bills.
"Click fraud" refers to the practice of "clicking on pay-per-click ads without the intent to buy advertisers' products or services," according to Clicklab LLC, a company that helps advertisers fight click fraud.
"It can be perpetrated by persons who systemically click on links, or use software to do so, to either garner profit for themselves through click commissions or to purposefully deplete the pay-per-click funds of a competitor."
The search-ad market is estimated at about $4 billion annually in the U.S.
"The Web-search companies concede that click fraud is an issue but decline to quantify its scope," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"Some outside estimates run as high as 20 percent of all clicks. Many companies complain that Google, Yahoo and other search engines are vague about how they are tackling the problem and unresponsive to questions about suspect clicks."
A Texarkana, Ark., retailer, Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC filed a lawsuit against several search engine companies, alleging the firms knowingly charged for fraudulent clicks. Other companies have turned to Clicklab and other anti-click-fraud services such as ClickDetective and WhosClickingWho for help.
To sniff out fraud, Clicklab examines more than 30 factors, such as the length of time spent on a client's site.
With WhosClickingWho, the service detects when someone has clicked on an ad multiple times and sends a pop-up message to the culprit warning that the service is tracking him.
Most important, the services provide reports that advertisers can use to negotiate refunds from search companies for the fraudulent clicks.
Thursday, June 9, 2005 3:24 p.m. EDT
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/6/9/155403.shtml
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 03:24 AM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2005
Catching 'Click Fraud' Online
Until recently, online advertisers had no way of knowing whether they were being victimized by click fraud, experts said. Now, however, software and services from firms such as WhosclickingWho.com, PPCTrax.com, Clicklab.com and ClickFacts.com are helping to discern the real visitors on the Web from the imaginary ones.
An auto repair shop owner buys some online ads and thinks he snagged a bargain by negotiating a deal with the advertising agency to pay only when Web surfers click on the banners. It sounds like a good deal, until the owner receives the bill: His US$1 per click deal turns into a $1 million invoice, and he has no idea how many of the clicks came from legitimate prospects.
Welcome to the world of Internet Learn how the leader in Internet services can help you start and grow your business online. Network Solutions. Go Farther. click fraud -- crimes emerging from an increasingly popular practice of pricing online ads.
Until recently, online advertisers had no way of knowing whether they were being victimized by click fraud, experts told UPI's The Web. Now, however, software and services from firms such as WhosclickingWho.com, PPCTrax.com, Clicklab.com and ClickFacts.com are helping to discern the real visitors on the Web from the imaginary ones.
Different Kinds of Click Fraud
"There is a lot of click fraud on the Internet," said Danay Escanaverino, director of marketing at Global Resource Systems in Plantation, Fla., a pioneering firm in the Web marketing field.
Many kinds of click fraud occur online. Some of it is perpetrated by competitors of a business, who click on their rivals' ads repeatedly in order to drive up their costs and even try to push them into insolvency. Another malicious fraud occurs when hackers click on ads or search for key words they know have been purchased for keyword searches, such as "car dealer" and "Chicago."
Perhaps the most egregious click fraud comes from Web sites that bill their advertisers for an imaginary number of clicks, simply to boost their advertising revenue.
"The primary question for marketers is, 'How do you determine which of those clicks are from real customers?'" said John Enright, vice president of marketing at Affinity Internet in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., a Web services provider for small businesses Latest News about small business.
The threat of fraudulent clicks is dominating the consciousness of the online ad industry today. The obsession is to "identify malicious versus legitimate traffic before it adversely affects the network," said Karen Regan, a spokeswoman for Mazu Networks in Cambridge, Mass., which makes software to track malicious behavior on networks.
The new software is helping contain the problem, experts said.
Various Protection Approaches
"You can monitor the visitors to a site or an ad and determine what search engine they used, whether it was Google or Yahoo or Ask Jeeves," said Pam Watkins, president of Fueled Communications in Dallas, an Internet marketing firm.
The tools also can help determine where a user entered a Web site -- an important fact, because many do not enter via the main page, but through links they may have seen elsewhere, or received in an e-mail from friends. The software can examine which parts of a Web site visitors trolled and how much time they spent there.
Controls can even prevent fraudulent clicks while they are happening. WhosClickingWho.com shows pop-ups to warn clickers if they are repeatedly clicking on the same ad.
Advertisers want these kinds of protections because the ad-click business has become a $4 billion-a-year industry. The biggest portion of Google's revenues comes from word-search clicks, so it, as well as Yahoo, have implemented in-house measures to ensure the integrity of the data. Google is also said to have refunded clients who were apparently overcharged for clicks.
Companies with a major online presence, like NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, Weather.com, iVillage.com and others use a service from Tacoda, a company in New York City, to segment, target and measure online ad campaigns, a Tacoda spokesman said.
Some related issues worry online advertisers in addition to click fraud. One of the metrics used to measure the traffic of a Web site is the number of "unique visitors" -- that is, how many different individuals visited a given site in a given time frame. This contrasts with the total number of clicks, which includes repeat visits by prospects.
Cookies Under Attack
Many consumers use anti-spyware software to eliminate cookies -- the mini-files deposited on the hard drives of Web users that are employed by sites to track unique visitors. Now, advertisers are fighting back with new technology. United Virtualities, also in New York City, has developed a backup ID system for cookies set by Web sites and advertising networks. The technology, called the Persistent Identification Element, is tagged to a user's Web browser. It provides advertisers with a unique identification, just like a cookie, and the tags cannot be deleted by any commercially available anti-spyware software today.
"All advertisers, Web sites and networks, use cookies for targeted advertising, but cookies are under attack," said Mookie Tenembaum, founder of United Virtualities. "They are being erased by 40 percent of users, creating serious problems. PIE will give publishers and third-party providers a persistent backup to cookies, effectively rendering them unassailable."
The PIE software is contained in just one line of code, he said.
Tenembaum said that from the advertiser's point of view the erasure of cookies constitutes a threat to an array of server-side applications, not just advertising, but also site registration and traffic counting.
By Gene J. Koprowski
UPI
06/18/05 5:00 AM PT
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2005
Advertisers Sue Google/Yahoo For Click Fraud
he Wall Street Journal ran a story today on a few advertisers who are suing Google and Yahoo because they feel that they are victims of "click fraud".
A group of advertisers quietly filed a lawsuit in February against Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and other Internet companies in a potentially important legal test of those companies' liability for a form of online-advertising fraud. The plaintiffs, led by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC, a retailer, allege that the Internet companies knowingly overcharged for advertisements they sold and conspired with each other to continue doing so. The plaintiffs are seeking to have their suit, which hasn't received widespread attention, certified as a class action. The suit concerns a growing search-industry problem of "click fraud," in which someone clicks on online ads with ill intent.
It is interesting that this escalated to legal proceedings. Typically when an advertiser is overcharged for an ad buy the publisher will refund their money (if they cannot make-good through additional ad inventory). Perhaps this case is different because the advertiser may feel that Google intended to cheat them. Or perhaps the parties are disagreeing on the actual amount of fraudulent clicks. Is there really a fool proof system to determine fraudulent clicks? A general number could be found by comparing log file data to Google/Yahoo click numbers. However, this may not be 100% accurate.
Advertisers running pay-per-click search campaigns can begin to protect themselves by taking the following steps:
1. Know the click fraud policy of the search site where your campaign is running
* how do they define click fraud?
* how do they prevent click fraud?
* how do they handle instances where they cannot prevent click fraud?
2. Set-up your own unique tracking codes for your search campaigns
3. Compare your tracking code data to that of the search engine
4. Look at unique user data, IP addresses, etc (anything that will help you to identify real user traffic)
5. Address discrepancies with the search engine
A few technologies have emerged to help advertisers address this problem but I have no direct experience using them. I welcome any other suggestions from the community.
Comments On This Entry
"A general number could be found by comparing log file data to Google/Yahoo click numbers."
If only it were that easy! That method really won't do the job. If you and are competitors, and my goal is to deplete your budget with extra clicks, your web server log files will match Google's perfectly. Problem is, the clicks won't be from bona fide users.
Your #3-#5 will detect some kinds of click fraud. But still not all. How to detect a sophisticated fraudster who uses distributed proxies (located around the country, perhaps on hacked user machines that have been infected with malware), who uses good software that generates realistic-looking HTTP headers and other HTTP traffic (perhaps instantiated IE). It's not an easy problem.
All that said, I remain surprised by how little the search engines have said about this problem and what they do to detect and stop it. Greater disclosure could help inspire greater confidence among their advertisers.
Posted by: ben Edelman at April 5, 2005 11:39 PM
Unfortunately you are correct Ben. A Savvy fraudster can disguise their efforts most of the time. While many companies are emerging to address this problem, it is unclear as to how effectively they perform.
One such company is http://www.whosclickingwho.com/
And in their FAQ section you will find this interesting blurb.
Don't the search engines track fraudulent clicks?
Sort of. The search engines do track fraudulent clicks, but from what we have seen their controls are not terribly strict. If someone clicks on your ad 5 times in 20 seconds, you probably won't be charged for all 5 clicks. BUT, if someone clicks on your ads once or twice per day for a month, our experience has shown that you will probably be charged for nearly every single click! We don't think this is right. Additionally, if someone is clicking across multiple search engines in order to hide their fraud, WhosClickingWho? will detect this! If you really want to know who is clicking your ads, you should be using WhosClickingWho?
Posted by: Peter Figueredo at April 6, 2005 08:29 AM
http://www.revenews.com/peterfigueredo/archives/000572.html
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2005
High Noon for Click Fraud
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING HAS PROVEN to be a digital gold rush, producing riches beyond the most optimistic predictions of a few years ago. But just as the gold rush of the Old West attracted con men, counterfeiters, and claim jumpers, the search engine gold rush has spawned its own breed of outlaw the click fraudster. Simply put, click fraud is the action of clicking on an advertisement where the user has no intention of interacting with, or transacting on, the destination Web site. It's any click not made in "good faith." Devoid of any talent or integrity, click fraudsters create artificially high click-through rates, effectively stealing from the advertisers who pay on a per-click basis.
I did not worry about this trend until a few months ago when we placed a pricey search campaign with a small, secondary search engine player. After only one week, we recorded thousands of clicks with almost no conversions - a suspicious result given a relatively high conversion from our other search engine marketing activities. More disturbing was that this was an established search vendor who performed well in the past for the advertiser.
Today, it's easier for publishers to make money in online advertising, given its current upswing, and especially in the search engine space where advertisers will pay $5 to $10 (or more) per click. Unscrupulous publishers who sign on with a search engine or an advertising network know they will be compensated for clicks they can generate to satiate the aggressive marketplace at least until they get caught (or move on). This high-demand, fluid marketplace requires greater scrutiny around the issue of click fraud.
What to do? First, a questionable campaign requires a call to the vendor to share your concerns. Request a detailed analysis of the clicks from the campaign. In our case, the search engine expressed more skepticism than willingness to investigate. In the end we did negotiate, and receive, additional inventory at no charge. But a "make good" does not reassure us for the next campaign.
Search marketers must go further than conducting "after the fact" cleanup. I suggest these four steps:
1. Search advertisers need to take responsibility for click fraud. It's too easy to say that click fraud is an issue for the search engines to address. With search demand outstripping supply there is a huge proliferation of new companies pitching for a slice of the search marketing pie. Not all of them will be as diligent as the established search engines such as Google and Overture. And while I believe that these companies have taken steps to monitor and investigate click fraud, it's not enough to assume that their staff and software will be on top of every campaign. Consider, for example, how many times you have felt that these search engines are stretched too thin to service this high-demand industry?
2. Search advertisers (and their agencies) must put monitoring in place. Today tools are out there which will report duplicate clicks from single IP addresses or domains. These tools can be set up to alert you of multiple clicking within a short period of time - a tip-off for potential click fraud. Who'sClickingWho? is one established pay-per-click auditing service offering this capability.
3. Take out an insurance policy. Third Party Adserving companies have an opportunity here. As many search engine marketers use Adserving tracking systems and optimization tools, it would be a natural extension to offer IP address reporting. While the Adservers claim that these reports are quite data intensive to generate and house, I suggest that many advertisers and agencies (including ours) would pay extra for this reporting.
4. The industry should introduce a formal auditing and certification program. Like the Good Housekeeping "Seal of Approval" this certification would be granted to search engines that submit to regular auditing of their campaigns. This is especially crucial for small search engines that want to attract larger advertisers as well as big-name search engines that want to foster trust in their contextual advertising networks comprised of hundreds of publishers. A certification program would go beyond search engines - such a program would also be useful for networks and sites that offer pay-per-click deals to their advertisers.
Setting these safeguards in place will serve to reassure existing search advertisers as well as new, more risk-adverse marketers who are still standing on the sidelines. Just as crucial, these safeguards will help drive the click fraudsters out of town and reassure those of us who champion the search engine cause.
Chris Bowler is vice president, media director, and search practice lead at Agency.com
by Chris Bowler, Wednesday, Mar 23, 2005 7:00 AM EST
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=28417&Nid=12684&p=295787
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
PPC ClickFraud: It's A Bigger Problem Then You Think
Pay per click search engine advertising is one of the most popular ways to promote a website.
Don't get caught in the trap...
With Overture and Google leading the pack, the industry as a whole has grown immensely in the past few years. According to a report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers, they estimate that Internet Advertising brought in more than $9 billion in 2004 alone.
With PPC advertising you choose "keywords/phrases," then bid how much you'd like to pay for each click. When a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your keyphrases, your short text ad appears, and if they click on it your account is then charged. In a "perfect world" this is the way it would work, but thanks to unscrupulous people, there's a dirty little secret known as "click fraud."
Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It's similar to paying out cash for false leads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of those who responded to a survey conducted by the "Search Engine Professional Organization" had stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising.
So where does click fraud come from? Well, there are actually a few different sources:
1) AdSense Users: Google Adsense has a program called "Adsense" that pays website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google does monitor this and it's against their terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a publishers doing this, they will lose their accounts, but some may still be clicking under the radar.
2) Your Competitors: Your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period of several days in order to deplete your ad budget.
3) Software: There are those who use automated clicking tools, such as robot programs, to click on PPC listings.
In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads for hours. Many don't know why they do it, and don't care, only that they'll be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do a search on any search engine you'll see plenty of sites looking to hire people for just this purpose. For more on this see...http://tinyurl.com/2ka5g
Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against click fraud. Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, users' session info and what they call "pattern recognition." They have a "proprietary system" in place for detecting fraud and a specialized team that monitors things and works with the advertisers to stop it.
Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud, such as "using negative keywords" to keep your ads from showing up for products and services that are unrelated. They also suggest adding tracking url's to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google. An easy way to do this is to add a ? to your links along with the identifier. For example, a tracking link to identify Google would look like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?referer-google
If you go through your log files, you'll be able to see your Google traffic at a glance.
If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right away, as they have a team of researchers that will investigate. They also take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Like Overture, they also have "proprietary technology" that distinguishes between normal clicks and invalid ones. Google never bills you for any "bad clicks" that are caught by their system.
So what's an honest website owner to do? You need to be alert to any "suspicious activity" by researching your server logs or stats. If you're experiencing a lot of clicks and no sales you'll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any spikes in traffic, usually on one keyword or phrase and coming from only one PPC source. You need to measure and track all of your PPC accounts closely.
If this sounds like too much work, you may want to look at an outside service to take care of it for you. A variety of new services have opened recently to help combat the click fraud problem.
1) Keyword Max: http://www.KeyWordMax.com
Offers up a service called "Click Auditor," which monitors the activity on your PPC accounts and alerts you to any suspicious activity. You can request a free demo at the site.
2) Click Detective: http://ClickDetective.net
A website monitoring service that uses sophisticated tracking mechanisms to determine whether "visitor behavior" is normal or not. Offering a 15 day free trial. Easy to use, you just copy and paste a snippet of code on your page and add a campaign ID by logging into your account.
3) Click Assurance: http://ClickAssurance.com
An Internet Security Firm that specializes in click fraud. They will audit your PPC accounts and go after any refunds you are due because of fraud.
4) Who's Clicking Who: http://WhosClickingWho.com
An independent auditing service that tracks individual users for fraud. Can also detect abuse coming from proxy servers. A one month subscription is $79.00, which includes free installation and up to 50,000 transactions per month.
5) ClickLab: http://ClickLab.com/products/click-fraud
This service isolates bad clicks with a scorecard based detection system. Pricing starts at $50.00 per month and is based on the number of sites you need to track and their page views.
ClickLab also has a nice white paper you should download while visiting: "How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud."
Click fraud isn't going away anytime soon. If anything, it will probably get worse before it get's any better. It's up to you as a vigilant website owner to do what you can to keep your PPC advertising costs down. You can't stop it, but with the right tracking in place, it can be managed and controlled, and hopefully kept to a minimum.
View All Articles by Merle
About the Author:
Merle of WebSiteTrafficPlan.com offers a F-r-e-e ebook and an e-course that will teach you how to promote and market your website.
Merle | Contributing Writer | 2005-03-14
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
PPC ClickFraud: It's A Bigger Problem Then You Think
Pay per click search engine advertising is one of the most popular ways to promote a website.
Don't get caught in the trap...
With Overture and Google leading the pack, the industry as a whole has grown immensely in the past few years. According to a report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers, they estimate that Internet Advertising brought in more than $9 billion in 2004 alone.
With PPC advertising you choose "keywords/phrases," then bid how much you'd like to pay for each click. When a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your keyphrases, your short text ad appears, and if they click on it your account is then charged. In a "perfect world" this is the way it would work, but thanks to unscrupulous people, there's a dirty little secret known as "click fraud."
Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It's similar to paying out cash for false leads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of those who responded to a survey conducted by the "Search Engine Professional Organization" had stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising.
So where does click fraud come from? Well, there are actually a few different sources:
1) AdSense Users: Google Adsense has a program called "Adsense" that pays website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google does monitor this and it's against their terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a publishers doing this, they will lose their accounts, but some may still be clicking under the radar.
2) Your Competitors: Your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period of several days in order to deplete your ad budget.
3) Software: There are those who use automated clicking tools, such as robot programs, to click on PPC listings.
In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads for hours. Many don't know why they do it, and don't care, only that they'll be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do a search on any search engine you'll see plenty of sites looking to hire people for just this purpose. For more on this see...http://tinyurl.com/2ka5g
Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against click fraud. Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, users' session info and what they call "pattern recognition." They have a "proprietary system" in place for detecting fraud and a specialized team that monitors things and works with the advertisers to stop it.
Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud, such as "using negative keywords" to keep your ads from showing up for products and services that are unrelated. They also suggest adding tracking url's to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google. An easy way to do this is to add a ? to your links along with the identifier. For example, a tracking link to identify Google would look like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?referer-google
If you go through your log files, you'll be able to see your Google traffic at a glance.
If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right away, as they have a team of researchers that will investigate. They also take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Like Overture, they also have "proprietary technology" that distinguishes between normal clicks and invalid ones. Google never bills you for any "bad clicks" that are caught by their system.
So what's an honest website owner to do? You need to be alert to any "suspicious activity" by researching your server logs or stats. If you're experiencing a lot of clicks and no sales you'll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any spikes in traffic, usually on one keyword or phrase and coming from only one PPC source. You need to measure and track all of your PPC accounts closely.
If this sounds like too much work, you may want to look at an outside service to take care of it for you. A variety of new services have opened recently to help combat the click fraud problem.
1) Keyword Max: http://www.KeyWordMax.com
Offers up a service called "Click Auditor," which monitors the activity on your PPC accounts and alerts you to any suspicious activity. You can request a free demo at the site.
2) Click Detective: http://ClickDetective.net
A website monitoring service that uses sophisticated tracking mechanisms to determine whether "visitor behavior" is normal or not. Offering a 15 day free trial. Easy to use, you just copy and paste a snippet of code on your page and add a campaign ID by logging into your account.
3) Click Assurance: http://ClickAssurance.com
An Internet Security Firm that specializes in click fraud. They will audit your PPC accounts and go after any refunds you are due because of fraud.
4) Who's Clicking Who: http://WhosClickingWho.com
An independent auditing service that tracks individual users for fraud. Can also detect abuse coming from proxy servers. A one month subscription is $79.00, which includes free installation and up to 50,000 transactions per month.
5) ClickLab: http://ClickLab.com/products/click-fraud
This service isolates bad clicks with a scorecard based detection system. Pricing starts at $50.00 per month and is based on the number of sites you need to track and their page views.
ClickLab also has a nice white paper you should download while visiting: "How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud."
Click fraud isn't going away anytime soon. If anything, it will probably get worse before it get's any better. It's up to you as a vigilant website owner to do what you can to keep your PPC advertising costs down. You can't stop it, but with the right tracking in place, it can be managed and controlled, and hopefully kept to a minimum.
View All Articles by Merle
About the Author:
Merle of WebSiteTrafficPlan.com offers a F-r-e-e ebook and an e-course that will teach you how to promote and market your website.
Merle | Contributing Writer | 2005-03-14
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2005
Click Fraud: Somebody Is Cheating You
Click fraud has been discussed among the affiliate and search engine marketing (SEM) communities for several years. Yet many online media buyers are unfamiliar with the term. Admittedly, when I began researching this topic, the first thing I learned was that I've got a lot to learn about click fraud.
I'm willing to bet you do, too.
Why is click fraud important? Simple: Click fraud means someone is cheating you and your clients. If we're vigilant protectors of our clients' interests, that should be important to us.
Click fraud is the practice of artificially inflating the number of clicks or conversions in an online campaign. This often occurs in search and affiliate marketing. The problem hasn't been discussed much outside of those environments. But click fraud potentially extends into any performance-based display advertising environments.
How prevalent is it? I've seen different figures stating up to 10 to 50 percent of click activity is suspect -- an astonishing number. In other words, your CPC (define) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) buys are potentially half as effective as they could be because of fraud.
Who's stealing from you and your clients?
* The amateurs. Kids or people with no social lives set up small Web sites and become a part of an affiliate network or Google's AdSense program. To generate a little income, they get with other small site publishers and click on each others' ads.
* The pros. Unethical and criminal publishers set up elaborate Web site networks and automated systems (bots) to generate fraudulent clicks, conversions, or both. In addition, reportedly programs have been set up in places such as India, Russia, and China, where people are paid to click on ads.
* Your competitors. Believe it or not, sometimes your competitors want so badly to win, they resort to clicking on your paid search listing or within other performance-based environments just to drive up your advertising costs.
How can you prevent click fraud? For the most part, companies offering solutions are focused on the affiliate and search marketing arenas. I predict they'll expand their services to encompass performance-based display advertising very soon.
Here are some ways to get ahead of the curve:
* Be more informed. Search on ClickZ for "click fraud." It's a great place to start. And keep an eye out for the latest news regarding the problem.
* Implement tools. Click Auditor and WhosClickingWho are two.
* Hire an expert. Companies such as Alchemist Media and ClickAssurance.com help you audit SEM campaigns to identify evidence of click fraud. The same sort of triggers they look for in SEM campaigns can be extended to other media.
ClickAssurance is an Internet security firm specializing in preventing click fraud. It audits SEM campaigns on contingency. If it finds evidence of fraud, it negotiates a rebate with the search engines. ClickAssurance is compensated with a percentage of what it gets back for you and your client.
I met with ClickAssurance's Jorge Zuniga for a short lesson on what click fraud means to our industry. His message can be summed up in one of the first things he shared, "Click fraud is a much bigger problem than people think. It's unlikely that we can prevent it altogether. But it can be controlled."
ClickAssurance hasn't yet addressed performance-based advertising beyond the search realm. Yet Zuniga assures me it's something his technical team has taken a keen interest in.
Ideally, big third-party ad servers will buy companies that specialize in the detection and prevention of click fraud or build the capability in-house. It would be so convenient if all the auditing necessary to prevent click fraud could be done in one place. For example, when this problem is detected on a campaign and the advertiser is owed a credit from the publisher, it could be handled in much the same way we currently handle other discrepancies.
Click fraud is something of a ticking bomb and carries the same sort of reputation-besmirching potential as pop-ups and spam. If we address the issue now, we can get a handle on it before the industry panics. The last thing we need is yet another issue that causes people to lose confidence in online advertising.
There's a lot to learn about click fraud and how to control it. The good news is there's a lot of information out there on the topic. The best places to start are affiliate and search marketing sites and forums. The important thing is you be the one to bring the issue to your clients' attention, as opposed to them asking you about it.
BY Pete Lerma | January 11, 2005
http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/agency_strat/article.php/3456371
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)
Click Fraud: Somebody Is Cheating You
Click fraud has been discussed among the affiliate and search engine marketing (SEM) communities for several years. Yet many online media buyers are unfamiliar with the term. Admittedly, when I began researching this topic, the first thing I learned was that I've got a lot to learn about click fraud.
I'm willing to bet you do, too.
Why is click fraud important? Simple: Click fraud means someone is cheating you and your clients. If we're vigilant protectors of our clients' interests, that should be important to us.
Click fraud is the practice of artificially inflating the number of clicks or conversions in an online campaign. This often occurs in search and affiliate marketing. The problem hasn't been discussed much outside of those environments. But click fraud potentially extends into any performance-based display advertising environments.
How prevalent is it? I've seen different figures stating up to 10 to 50 percent of click activity is suspect -- an astonishing number. In other words, your CPC (define) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) buys are potentially half as effective as they could be because of fraud.
Who's stealing from you and your clients?
* The amateurs. Kids or people with no social lives set up small Web sites and become a part of an affiliate network or Google's AdSense program. To generate a little income, they get with other small site publishers and click on each others' ads.
* The pros. Unethical and criminal publishers set up elaborate Web site networks and automated systems (bots) to generate fraudulent clicks, conversions, or both. In addition, reportedly programs have been set up in places such as India, Russia, and China, where people are paid to click on ads.
* Your competitors. Believe it or not, sometimes your competitors want so badly to win, they resort to clicking on your paid search listing or within other performance-based environments just to drive up your advertising costs.
How can you prevent click fraud? For the most part, companies offering solutions are focused on the affiliate and search marketing arenas. I predict they'll expand their services to encompass performance-based display advertising very soon.
Here are some ways to get ahead of the curve:
* Be more informed. Search on ClickZ for "click fraud." It's a great place to start. And keep an eye out for the latest news regarding the problem.
* Implement tools. Click Auditor and WhosClickingWho are two.
* Hire an expert. Companies such as Alchemist Media and ClickAssurance.com help you audit SEM campaigns to identify evidence of click fraud. The same sort of triggers they look for in SEM campaigns can be extended to other media.
ClickAssurance is an Internet security firm specializing in preventing click fraud. It audits SEM campaigns on contingency. If it finds evidence of fraud, it negotiates a rebate with the search engines. ClickAssurance is compensated with a percentage of what it gets back for you and your client.
I met with ClickAssurance's Jorge Zuniga for a short lesson on what click fraud means to our industry. His message can be summed up in one of the first things he shared, "Click fraud is a much bigger problem than people think. It's unlikely that we can prevent it altogether. But it can be controlled."
ClickAssurance hasn't yet addressed performance-based advertising beyond the search realm. Yet Zuniga assures me it's something his technical team has taken a keen interest in.
Ideally, big third-party ad servers will buy companies that specialize in the detection and prevention of click fraud or build the capability in-house. It would be so convenient if all the auditing necessary to prevent click fraud could be done in one place. For example, when this problem is detected on a campaign and the advertiser is owed a credit from the publisher, it could be handled in much the same way we currently handle other discrepancies.
Click fraud is something of a ticking bomb and carries the same sort of reputation-besmirching potential as pop-ups and spam. If we address the issue now, we can get a handle on it before the industry panics. The last thing we need is yet another issue that causes people to lose confidence in online advertising.
There's a lot to learn about click fraud and how to control it. The good news is there's a lot of information out there on the topic. The best places to start are affiliate and search marketing sites and forums. The important thing is you be the one to bring the issue to your clients' attention, as opposed to them asking you about it.
BY Pete Lerma | January 11, 2005
http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/agency_strat/article.php/3456371
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2005
SEM ORG holds panel discussing Click Fraud
Search Engine Marketers in Dallas/Fort Worth Educate Businesses on Click Fraud in Paid Search Marketing
DFW Search Engine Marketing Organization holds panel discussing click fraud and its business and industry implications
Dallas/Fort Worth – Anyone involved in search engine marketing knows that click fraud, or the fraudulent “clicking” of paid search advertisements, is a big deal. Click fraud could threaten the success of any search campaign – and could potentially threaten the industry as a whole.
The Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) will be hosting a panel featuring some of the top click fraud detection and click auditing firms in the business. Those who attend the panel will learn:
- how click fraud occurs
- how it will impact the industry
- what the search engines are doing to fight it
- who is perpetrating the fraud
- how you can prevent the fraudsters from depleting your search budget
Attendees will also hear an how a Dallas agency recently received a credit after discovering fraudulent clicks on their client's PPC search marketing campaign.
If you have any interest in paid search advertising for your company or your clients, don't miss this discussion on the most pressing issue in search engine marketing today.
FEATURED PANELISTS:
Click Assurance
[link]
Click Assurance is a Dallas-based Internet Security Company whose aim is to educate the PPC industry about the risks of click fraud and provide industry leading technology and service to our clients.
Who's Clicking Who
[link]
Who’s Clicking Who is an ASP-based PPC audit firm based in Santa Clara, California.
Question and Answer session to follow panel.
MEETING DETAILS:
Seating limited - to reserve your place, please RSVP to 972.831.2124
Date:
Monday, January 17, 2005, 6:30 PM
Cost:
DFWSEM Members: Free
Non-members: $10 at the door
Meeting Place:
Romano's Macaroni Grill in Addison / North Dallas, on
Beltline Road between Midway and the Tollway.
4535 Beltline Rd., Dallas, TX 75001
Phone: 972-386-3831 Dallas, TX 75001
Phone: 972-386-3831
[link]
ABOUT DFWSEM
The Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Organization is dedicated to educating businesses in the Dallas/Fort Worth area about the benefits of search engine marketing. The group meets once a month at various locations throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. To become a registered member of DFWSEM email info@dfwsem.org. Individual DFWSEM memberships are $75 for the first year. Corporate memberships are $175 for the first year and include 3 seats to monthly DFWSEM meetings. Additional seats for a Corporate membership are $50/year. All annual memberships receive a link from DFWSEM to your company web site, and a complimentary subscription to Revenue Magazine. MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and checks are accepted. DFWSEM meets the third Monday of every month at various locations around the Metroplex. For more information, visit [link]
Posted: 01/07/2005 08:39 am
http://searchengineforums.com/apps/webmaster.forums/action::thread/thread::1105115946/forum::conferences/
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
How Click Fraud Affects Pay Per Click Advertisers
Recently, an article appeared on CNET stating that Google has filed a lawsuit against a Texas-based company alleging they fraudulently abused the Google PPC system to profit from the advertisers' ad spending.
This is quite interesting, as it proves that click fraud is becoming more of a problem than ever and search engines are finally taking action.
As well, there was a case earlier this year where a California man tried to blackmail Google by threatening to release a software program that could cost them millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks unless they paid him $150,000. Fortunately, Google fought back, and the man was indicted. Other than that, this is really the first time that a search engine has taken legal means in order to fight scammers.
Depending on how much you spend on PPC advertising, you may or may not feel the results of such fraud. In some competitive industries, clicks reach a cost of $5 and more. Those particular ads represent the biggest payoff for the perpetrators, so top advertisers definitely feel it when as much as 5% to 15% of their spending goes to waste.
One of the main problems is that Google and other search engines offer revenue-sharing programs, such as AdSense, for publishers who are willing to put Google content ads on their websites. Monitoring thousands and thousands of publishers can be a daunting task, and you can bet that, human nature being what it is, some website owners click on their ads every now and then to boost their revenue. While individually that may not be much money lost, collectively it becomes a huge issue.
Click fraud can also occur in several other ways. Whether it's an automated bot that is programmed to click on your ads, a company employing low-wage workers in India or China to click on ads from home, an organized setup in Omaha, Nebraska complete with rotating IP addresses on all 300 computers in the warehouse, or your own competitor himself trying to deplete your budget, it's getting pretty hard to track and monitor.
I've also observed that most search engines are very secretive about their fraud monitoring systems. While the reasoning behind that is clear, it doesn't really tell us exactly how they are battling the problem. This leaves advertisers on their own to try and figure out what's going on. Luckily, there are tools available, such as Who's Clicking Who and Clicklab that track your advertising activity for you and report any suspicion of fraud.
My personal recommendation would be to carefully monitor your own traffic using a third party service. It's an added cost, but if you spend several hundreds per month on PPC advertising, it'll be worth it. If you notice any unusual activity, don't hesitate to contact the search engine, investigate the issue, and request a refund for those clicks. Most of the time, they will be more than happy to comply with your request.
Unfortunately, I expect click fraud to grow and diversify, so it's important that you have the knowledge and tools to protect yourself against it.
About the Author:
Boris Mordkovich is the editor for a PPC resource site, PayPerClickUniverse.com. PPCU offers articles, reviews, weekly blog, and more to help small businesses get the most out of Pay Per Click.
Boris Mordkovich | Contributing Writer | 2004-12-15
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2004
Eight Months of Click Fraud in Oregon
When Scott Hendison launched his Portland-based online insurance consulting business OregonHealthInsurance.net in the summer of 2003, he opted to promote it using keyword search advertising on Google and Overture.
After initial happiness with the results, eight months later Hendison discovered someone with a Portland-based IP address had been clicking on his ads at over 20 times the frequency of a person looking for an online insurance quote.
Hendison calculated that, at a cost of $6 per click, the extra activity from that IP address alone was costing him between $200 and $300 per month.
It was a classic case of click fraud, the intentional defrauding of online advertisers by clicking on ads in order to drive up their marketing costs.
"I thought I had found an easy way to get sales leads, but when I looked closely at my Web logs, I saw one IP address showing up with very suspicious frequency," Hendison said. "No one can be that stupid to need to search for a health insurance quote a couple times a day, every day of the week, every week."
After doing some research, he located a company called WhosClickingWho.com, which specializes in preventing, detecting, and eliminating click-fraud on behalf of customers like Hendison. "It was either that or discontinue pay-per-click advertising entirely," Hendison said. "As a local advertiser with a small, independently owned business, an extra $300 added to my budget per month was killing me."
For $30 dollars a month, WhosClickingWho.com allowed Hendison to get more data on the suspect IP address and send a customized pop-up window to the person behind it when he or she clicked on his ad. The message, which Hendison wrote, read, "Stop, you weasel! I know who you are and have reported you to the proper authorities."
"I never got another click from that address afterward," Hendison said.
Hendison's story is one local example of a poorly understood trend search engines and advertisers small and large around the country are growing more concerned about, said John Squire, vice president of product management at Coremetrics.
"I recognize three aspects to click fraud nowadays," Squire said. "It's bigger than most people realize. It's hard for your average person to understand. And, for larger advertisers at least, it's easy to ignore."
But for local advertisers like Hendison, the difference between being cash flow positive versus negative could be the result of a single individual attempting to defraud them, Squire added.
"For those local guys, Clicklabs, WhosClickingWho.com, ClickAssurance and the rest offer services that address a critical piece of the market and probably will be profitable," Squire said.
For his part, Hendison took the additional step of reporting the incident with documentation to both Google and Overture, asking for reimbursement. He estimates he was reimbursed for 95 percent of the fraudulent click charges by Overture. He was reimbursed for only 50 percent of the charges by Google, which he said took longer to get back to him, and later contested whether what looked like minimal traffic qualified for click fraud at all.
Google spokesman Steve Langdon declined to comment specifically on the incident, saying, "Our customers are very important to us, and we very much want to make their experience a good one."
Hendison closed his business due to cash-flow problems in May 2004, choosing to devote himself full-time to his other business, an IT consulting company called PortlandConsulting.com. He continues to invest in pay-per-click advertising through both Google and Overture for that company and issues his own customers the following advice on keyword search advertising: "If you're spending at least $300 a month in pay-per-click advertising, then a $30 a month investment to prevent click fraud makes sense."
Since Hendison first purchased the product, the price of WhosClickingWho's
yearly package service has gone up to $499 a year, which amounts to
approximately $42 per month. Customers who pay on a month-to-month
basis are charged $79 a month.
By Rob McGann | December 13, 2004
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3446801
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2004
Google Sues over 'Click Fraud'
With the ever increasing amounts of money being spent on per-click advertising and the great potential for abuse inherent in the system, it is safe to say that this lawsuit is the beginning of what is likely to be a host of other lawsuits relating to this topic.
On November 15, Google Latest News about Google filed a lawsuit against Texas-based Auctions Expert International (AEI) for engaging in "click fraud" and attempting to force Google's advertisers to pay for fraudulently generated clicks.
Google claims, among other things, that AEI constructed its Web site Learn how the leader in Internet services can help you start and grow your business online. Network Solutions. Go Farther. with the sole purpose of generating false clicks and collecting advertising fees. More particularly, Google accuses AEI of abusing Google's AdSense program, in which online publishers display Google's pay-per-click ads and then receive a portion of the proceeds.
Most search engine advertising programs, including Google's, operate on a cost-per-click model whereby they charge advertisers based on the number of clicks the text advertisements receive. Google allows advertisers to bid for placement of paid links that appear when certain key words are entered on its sites.
However, the cost-per-click model is subject to abuse by those who engage in click fraud to generate invalid clicks. Potentially, click fraud could have severe consequences on advertisers by evaporating their marketing budgets in a very short time period.
Click Fraud Methods
Click fraud can be initiated through an automated click generation method or by human beings. A common method is by using online robots Latest News about robots, or "bots," that are programmed to click on advertisers' text links that are displayed or listed in search queries. Another method is to employ low cost workers -- which is being done in India and China and other low-wage countries -- to click on text links and other Internet advertisements. A third method can be executed by employees of rival companies who click on competitors' ads in the hope of exhausting their marketing budgets.
Although click fraud has been happening since the cost-per-click pricing model was implemented, it has only recently received a lot of attention. This is due to, among other things, online advertisers becoming more sophisticated with respect to the cost-per-click pricing model. Another reason for the increased exposure relates to the greater competition for desirable keywords, which has resulted in a marked increase in the price paid by some advertisers for certain keywords, which in turn has resulted in a substantial increase in the overall cost of per-click programs for most advertisers.
The problem is quite serious as the cost for advertisers can be relatively high in some sectors. In some sectors, such as travel or legal, it could cost advertisers several dollars per click.
Interestingly, some advertisers have not pushed the issue with search networks out of a fear of jeopardizing their relationship with them. It is impossible to measure with accuracy the extent of click fraud. However, some estimates put it as high as 50 percent of total ad clicks.
Technologies that measure click rates have been developed to curb the trend of click fraud. For example, Whosclickingwho.com sells technology to examine click rates and sales that result from paid searches.
Patterns Detected
A fraud-detecting technology or tracking system that analyzes Web traffic logs or surfing behavior will attempt to detect consistent patterns of behavior over a period of time. For example, if a page is turned every 1.5 seconds over a period of time, the traffic might be flagged as suspicious.
Google also has its own technology that purports to detect and eliminate this kind of fraud. Steve Langdon, Google's spokeman, stated, "this lawsuit against Auctions Expert demonstrates the success of our anti-fraud system and that we will take legal action when appropriate." However, others have commented that the lawsuit is evidence that Google's fraud-detection technology is not as fool-proof as Google would have its advertisers believe.
With the ever increasing amounts of money being spent on per-click advertising and the great potential for abuse inherent in the system, it is safe to say that this lawsuit is the beginning of what is likely to be a host of other lawsuits relating to this topic.
Javad Heydary, an E-Commerce Times columnist, is a Toronto lawyer licensed to practice in both Ontario and New York and is the managing editor of Lawsof.com.
By Javad Heydary
E-Commerce Times
12/09/04 5:00 AM PT
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Google-Sues-over-Click-Fraud-38749.html
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2004
Exposing click fraud
Internet marketers facing higher advertising fees on search networks are becoming increasingly concerned about a form of online fraud that was thought to have been contained years ago.
News.context
What's new:
Net marketers facing higher ad fees are becoming increasingly worried about an online practice known as "click fraud."
Bottom line:
The persistence of click fraud has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Internet search marketing, but most advertisers aren't sure how to address the problem.
The practice, known as "click fraud," began in the early days of the Internet's mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures. This led companies to develop policing technologies touted as antidotes to the problem. But some marketing executives estimate that up to 20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today's search industry.
In one recent example of the problem, law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program. He was indicted by a California jury in June.
Matt Parrella, chief of the San Jose branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Northern California, said that case was "not unique." The problem "is certainly not shrinking, and we're ready to prosecute people," said Parrella, whose office handled the Google case.
Click fraud is perpetrated in both automated and human ways. The most common method is the use of online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links that are displayed on Web sites or listed in search queries. A growing alternative employs low-cost workers who are hired in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads. A third form of fraud takes place when employees of companies click on rivals' ads to deplete their marketing budgets and skew search results.
Although the extent of click fraud is impossible to measure with any certainty, its persistence has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Internet search marketing. Google's pending initial public offering has been widely anticipated as a barometer of online advertising and the post-apocalyptic dot-com climate in general.
"It's hard to tell how big the problem is, but people are looking at it closer and closer as the cost of search advertising goes up," said John Squire, vice president of business development of Coremetrics, a Web analytics firm. "Click fraud is a fin sticking out of the water: You're not sure if it's a great white shark or a dolphin."
Unlike advertising in traditional media such as billboards and print publications, "cost per click" Internet ads displayed with specific keyword searches have been promoted as a definitive way for companies to gauge their exposure to potential customers. As a result, U.S. sales from advertiser-paid search results are expected to grow 25 percent this year to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2003, according to research firm eMarketer. From 2002 to 2003, the market rose by 175 percent.
As more advertisers have competed for desirable keywords in their industries, the cost for clicks has risen too. On average, advertisers are paying 45 cents per click this year, according to financial analysts, up from 40 cents in 2003 and 30 cents in the second quarter of 2002. In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.
But marketing executives say click fraud is pervasive among affiliates of search leaders Google, Yahoo-owned Overture Services and FindWhat.com. In a typical affiliation, any Web publisher can become a partner of these large networks by displaying their paid links on a Web page or within its own search results and then share in the profits with every click.
"There's a fatal flaw in the cost-per-click model because a ton of marketing dollars can be depleted in a fraction of a second," said Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, a search-engine marketing firm based in Los Angeles that specializes in fraud protection. "Technology is continuing to be developed that can exploit this pricing model at incredibly high volumes."
Google's fraud squad
Google declined an interview for this report, citing the mandatory "quiet period" before its initial public offering, which is expected to raise $2.7 billion. But the company said in a statement that it has been "the target of individuals and entities using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years. We have applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employ a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyze clicks."
In recent documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company also acknowledged the problem as a threat to its revenue, of which 95 percent is derived from advertising. Google and other search networks provide refunds to advertisers when click fraud has been discovered.
"If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase," Google said in its SEC filing. "If we find new evidence of past fraudulent clicks we may have to issue refunds retroactively of amounts previously paid to our Google Network members."
Google and Overture employ "fraud squads," or teams of people dedicated to fighting click schemes. But at least two marketing executives say such countermeasures are missing fraudulent clicks that are responsible for between 5 percent and 20 percent of advertising fees paid to all search networks.
Overture spokeswoman Jennifer Stephens refutes that estimate, saying that the numbers likely represent acts of fraud that are ultimately caught. She added that Overture filters most fraudulent clicks with the best antifraud system in the industry, which combines technology and human analysis.
"We take this very seriously; it's the foundation of what we do," Stephens said. "If an advertiser has a question about it, we look into all matters."
Cost-per-click advertising comes in many forms, but it essentially lets marketers gain exposure on a Web site and pay only when people click on their ads. Google and Overture let advertisers bid for placement of paid links, which appear when certain keyword searches are conducted on the networks' sites or those of third parties that partner with them. Keyword ads can also be distributed according to the content of partners' sites and displayed on non-search pages. (CNET Networks, which publishes News.com, partners with Google for shared advertising revenue.)
Most advertisers are aware of the click-fraud issue but have not delved into it because of the technical complexities involved. Others are concerned that they could jeopardize their relationships with the powerful search networks if they complain too loudly.
"It is a bigger problem, but folks just don't want to take the time to track it down because it's a complex problem," Coremetrics' Squire said. Given that some of the largest marketers manage up to 1 million keywords in a campaign, he added, the data can be difficult to crunch.
Danny Sullivan, who runs a quarterly search-industry conference, said many advertisers do not raise their concerns with the ad networks because "they're afraid that if they complain, it will hurt their free listings."
Still, more fraud-detection technologies are emerging to help advertisers analyze their campaigns and traffic. Some advertisers and search-engine marketing companies say they are compiling lists of sites that generate a high number of clicks but not sales.
Coremetrics, Urchin and Whosclickingwho.com are just a few that sell technology to examine click rates and sales that result from paid searches. Alchemist Media, which charges flat fees for its consulting services, has detected fraud while acting as an intermediary between search networks and marketers.
In general, Alchemist's Stricchiola estimates that 10 percent of all search ad clicks could be fraudulent. But she said the rate can reach 20 percent in particular businesses that have been targeted for click fraud.
Roy de Souza, CEO of advertising technology firm Zedo, said his company's geotracking systems have traced Internet Protocol addresses to detect click operations in China. In describing one common scheme, he said a legitimate site is duplicated under another name, complete with text ads from a search network. A bot would then be trained to click on the ad links that appear on the bogus site, said de Souza, who estimated that click fraud affects 10 percent to 20 percent of today's search network ads.
Many policing technologies can counter click fraud by analyzing Web traffic logs or surfing behavior. If a page is turned every 1.8 seconds over a period of time, for example, fraud-detecting systems will flag the traffic as suspiciously uniform.
Covert clicks
Human operations can be more difficult to detect because a wide network of people can click on ads from different computers across many regions, without a steady pattern. According to a report in the India Times, residents are being hired to click paid links from home, with the hopes of making between $100 to $200 per month.
In other instances, the source of bogus clicks can be much closer to home.
Joe, the chief executive of an Internet marketing company, enjoys clicking on his rivals' text ads on Google and Yahoo because his competitor must pay as much as $15 each time he does it. Eventually, such phantom clicks can add up and drain a rival's budget.
"It's an entertainment," said the executive, who asked to keep his name and company anonymous. "Why do you run into a store without dropping a quarter in the meter? You know it's wrong, but you do it."
Kevin Lee, chief executive of search marketing firm Did-It, estimates that fraud from such "drive-by" competitive clicks and affiliate scams makes up about 5 percent of the industry's total sales. Lee concedes that he can only guess at the number, but he does know one thing for sure:
If it gets much higher, he said, "then we should all be getting worried."
Published: July 19, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/Exposing+click+fraud/2100-1024_3-5273078.html?tag=nl
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 04:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2004
Arrest Shows Google's Vulnerability
Michael Bradley, recently arrested for his boneheaded attempt to extort money from Google, is a wake up call to the PPC industry.
He claimed to have developed software that would roam the web and click on AdSense ads, potentially costing both Google and their advertisers millions.
Once he'd developed his software he offered it to Google for $100k. When he didn't hear back from them he threatened to release the program to 100 spammers and the public at large. He also offered his services as a click fraud consultant.
The FBI has him on tape, in Google's offices, making his "pitch."
Now consider a smarter click fraud engineer. His software allows fraudsters to type in competitor's names and then crawl the web clicking on AdSense ads where his competitor's ads appear. Perhaps it even clicks on AdWords ads for your competitor's search terms.
Instead of trying to extort money from Google, this click fraud engineer sells his software to unscrupulous marketers, allowing them to steal their competitors' ad budget.
Well, click fraud software already exists. I found some discussed in this WebMasterWorld thread. While I've never seen any advertised, I'm sure if you know the right people, or search terms, it would not be hard to find (I couldn't find any when I searched on "click fraud software").
How widespread is the use of PPC fraud software? I don't have any numbers. How widespread is manual click fraud? Again, not much talk from Gooogle and Overture regarding the percentage of fradulent clicks.
Because of this lack of information advertisers have to rely on anecdotal evidence from forums to determine the rate of click fraud, and the problem with this type of information is that it's only the most upset and indignant advertisers writing in, and is often biased against PPC.
I read an article recently from an organic SEO firm that argued against using PPC ads. The author pointed to click fraud as the main reason marketers should (pay him to) organically optimize their sites.
So if you're using PPC what can you do?
First off, watch for paid clicks that don't have corresponding page views. Be sure you're tracking everything separately, down to the keyword.
If you have to make a fraud claim, be sure that you've documented everything - including emails to whoever's hitting you with drive by clicks and emails to and from your PPC provider.
Finally, consider click fraud prevention software. Here are a couple I found but have not tested (and really, what more could they do than analytics software? The best defense is a good offense.)
http://www.keywordmax.com/click_auditor.html
http://www.whosclickingwho.com/
So here's what I'd like to see from PPC providers - more information on click fraud prevention, both what they're doing and what advertisers can do. Documented click fraud percentages would be nice too, and bring some much-needed transparency to the PPC industry.
I used this article on CPC Click Fraud for research.
Garrett French
Staff Writer
2004-03-22
Posted by Hans A. Koch at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)