What the SE’s are going to do about click fraud?
by Sapphire (February 11, 2005)
Read this and tell me what you get out of it: When Mice Attack
Google, Overture and a raft of smaller search sites get paid by advertisers each time a visitor clicks on an ad link. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the Internet?long a magnet for the unscrupulous?has minted a new breed of swindler that clicks on those links not to buy the advertised product, but to accelerate a rival’s ad spending or even to collect part of the fee themselves (Using Google’s AdSense program, Web-site publishers can run the ads posted by Google and share the revenue).
What I get out of it is: the search engines get their money no matter who clicks on your ads. It’s only in their best interest to stop click fraud if it gets so bad that people stop using it altogether as a form of promotion.
Don’t get me wrong: I do think some of the engines are genuinely concerned and have been trying to address the situation as best they could. It’s not that simple to tell a real click from a cleverly disguised fraudulent one, but at least they’re tackling some of the more obvious cases, and looking into ways to get even more subtle:
Spokespeople for Google and Yahoo’s Overture ad division say they are tackling click fraud by developing software that looks for warning signs and filters out fake traffic, and by reimbursing advertisers who are able to document that they’ve been subject to fraud (neither will disclose their total reimbursements). Last November, Google also sued a Texas firm for allegedly signing up for AdSense, creating a Web site with Google ads and then clicking on them to earn money.
That’s good news. But to give you an idea what the engines are up against even if they are sufficiently motivated to stop this:
Scammers, many of them based overseas, use new automated software tools that mask identifying IP addresses and click only during slow periods of the month so that a sudden increase in clicks doesn’t set off alarms.
This is going to be a continual challenge for the engies and for the burgeoning industry that helps companies prevent fraud for a fee. So the bottom line is: will the big PPC advertisers feel comfortable risking click fraud, even with all the measures various folks are taking to prevent it? Or will the ultimately decide no matter what we do, the good guys are always going to be a day late and a dollar short?
Exactly how much damage can these fraudsters do when they hatch a new trick to generate indetectable fraudulent clicks? Even if the engines or the click fraud prevention companies are just a few days behind catching them, how much can the fraudsters steal in a few days? With keywords that pay as much as $12 a click, quite a lot.
What’s going to make or break advertiser confidence in the PPC form of promotion is search engine reimbursement for fraud. Will search engines guarantee a low click fraud rate, and actually stand behind it by reimbursing companies who fall prey to damaging levels of fraud? Without that reassurance, I don’t think we can expect huge sums of money to be spent on PPC advertising. And of course, the search engines want huge sums spent on PPC, so it’s a balancing act in the end. How much can they afford to reimburse? How much can they afford not to reimburse?
Posted in SEO
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