Newsweek On Click Fraud, Search Engine Response

prostoalex writes "Newsweek magazine says click fraud is the bane of the search advertising industry. Google and Yahoo! are apparently working on the standardized definition of a "good-faith" click in order to weed out the fraudulent ones. Meanwhile, merchants like Assaf Nehoray are taking their money elsewhere, getting abundant clicks, but no real revenue on Internet advertising campaigns. Newsweek also mentions Google suing a Texas company for placing the AdSense code and then clicking on it in order to run up the revenue. John Battelle says that his friends in the search industry tell him the click fraud is growing and that changes are not too far away."

You're about six months behind

Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks [slashdot.org]

Puff

Everyone is affected, big or small "publisher".

But I assure you that it hurts when your 100$ Adword budget goes in a puff of probably fraudulents clicks, with nothing you can do about it. The guys at SEO Chat forum [seochat.com] are not very happy about this, I assure you.

It's discouraging me of running small-scale Adwords campaigns, honestly.

Re:Puff

Is there any service that advertising can pool their useless clicks?

To an advertiser, a useless click is a click that hits the adwords landing page and little (or nothing else) and does not mean a sale. If these bogus clicks could then be processed at a 3rd party auditing house, then fraud could be detected and each member could then complain to google about bogus clicks.

I am sure someone must have thought of this already - I just can't find it listed on google :(

Re:Puff

But then who polices the advertisers? Is Google supposed to trust you to tell them when a visitor who reaches your landing page converts into a sale? What if you're not selling anything, at least not directly? I can see all kinds of problems at that end, too.

Really, you're paying Google for traffic. Qualified traffic, yes, but traffic just the same. How you convert that traffic into sales is not Google's worry.

Eric
Listen, people: JavaScript is not Java [ericgiguere.com]

Darn!

I thought they were talking about Amazon's one-click!

Click fraud?

What exactly is this click fraud thing? I can't really see how it can be exactly defined. Maybe the owners of the website occasionally want to click on their own adverts because (*shock*) the product is actually relevant to their site, and thus to them. In fact, relevance is supposed to be the whole idea of Google's TextAds, isn't it?

Obviously someone genuinely wanting to click their own ads ten thousand times is rather unlikely, but where do you draw the line? Is this written in a contract anywhere? What about getting other people to click the ads for you?

This seems to be a very fuzzy legal matter. I'm as pro-Google as the next Slashdotter but I can't see how they have a water-tight case here. That said, I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone can correct me.

Re:Click fraud?

You are a webmaster and you want to see what the ads link to for relevance. Mouse over and check the status bar for the link and then simply type it into your browser window.

You've adhered to google's policies AND discovered what the result of that click

Re:Click fraud?

maybe this would be a bit easier for everyone hey....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud [wikipedia.org]
It's not that difficult to format a URL is it?

Uh duh...

Who ever thought Google AdWords were any more effective than a pop up ad? The reason so many porn sites use pop ups is that often times they get paid on a "per view" or "per click" basis. Hmmm...if every user has to click the fake 'X' in the top corner, thus sending them to the advertiser, then the referring porn site makes money on a click through.

Same idea with AdWords. Why would anyone think click through ads are any better? Everyone remember the days when they had the little clients that would monitor when you were online and give you money for every hour you surfed? Ha, how long did it take you to set up a macro to run the mouse while you slept? :-)

The only advertising that makes you money, is advertising that sells your product. Tricking people into following a link or viewing a page they didn't want to doesn't do anyone any good in the long run. Pay per click can only last so long.

Re:Uh duh...

HA!

"The only advertising that makes you money, is advertising that sells your product. Tricking people into following a link or viewing a page they didn't want to doesn't do anyone any good in the long run."

And in this posters sig:

"Get a FREE MiniMac

Re:Uh duh...

Disagree. Pay per click isn't the problem. Bad (misleading) ads are the problem; there's no reason to presume that pay per click will die because of these. The advertisers will die, instead. And where's the downside of that?

There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.

If you do follow those basic guidelines, then the ads will bring potential customers by your pages, and some percentage of them will actually purchase your product(s) and/or service(s).

There's no magic to this -- unless you're a fraud right out of the gate anyway.

That's not to say that you can't work the system in such a way as to make it legitimately benefit you. For instance:

Some of my competitors do such a poor job, I decided to put Google ads right on our sales pages so our customers could easily find our competitors. The results they get are so yucky that I consider them to be marketing for us, in a reverse sort of way. There's nothing on our pages that say "go look at how crappy our competitors are, click the ads and then come back" or anything like that... the ads just sit there, advertising software similar to ours... and our sales picked up about 20% over four weeks once we put the ads on. Apparently, our customers are savvy enough to know where they've been -- and how to come back -- when they wander off to look at these other folks. And the funny thing is that we get paid for all this. Now, if our competitors are silly enough to keep advertising a shoddy product, why, I'm simply delighed to host their ads. :)

Re:Uh duh...

The advertisers will die, instead. And where's the downside of that?

The downside is that sites that use advertising in a (sometimes last-ditch) attempt to recoup hosting/bandwidth costs will no longer be free.

Zombies being used as proxies?

I wonder how much of getting away with this is done by using open proxies laid down on zombies by $WORM_OF_THE_MONTH.

Obviously the SEs know to watch for 100+ adwords clicks in 15 minutes from the same IP (though maybe this is harder due to decentralization of the data centers and another reason for them to get a dark fiber network - see the article from earlier today) but if the clicks appear to be coming from broadband users across the US, I could see worms playing a big part in this, relatively undetectably.

This is old hat in the adult industry:

For any affiliate program, as that community operates like the mos eisley cantina. In fact, it's expected, and has been dealt with over and over. Google should talk to the old guard on this one.

I'm sorry to admit that gfy [gofuckyourself.com] is the authoritative source on this problem; no joke!

Overture "click protection"

A while back I had a frustrating exchange with Overture (aka Yahoo) on "Click Protection" on their PPC service. In the meantime I have back engineered their highly touted filter and it is a joke. I could write click bot with a few lines of Perl and a list of proxy servers. My experience has been that they will not pay attention to you until you have goon thru the trouble of documenting the event. Here is a summary of my experience.

Overture claims to provide "Click Protection" for their pay-per-click advertising service. In reality they fail to prevent the most basic and easiest to detect non-authentic clicks - that is competitors clicking on competitors. They do not even filter out a customer clicking on their own links from within the Overture manager. Nor do they provide a method for an advertiser to test their own ad rendered URL's - a necessary function as a means to test the validity of an entered URL.

Since filtering out such clicks would be simple and straight forward using established cookies or session id's - I can only speculate the reasons for not patching this obvious flaw and question the "sophistication of Overtures "Click Protection".

For a complete write up see Overture Click Protection Paper [perlworks.com]

It hurts publishers too

I am a Adsense publisher, which means I show thier ads on my site. I earn quite good money (more than two thousand US dollars a month) for doing next to nothing. What concerns me is that they say "oh poor advertisers" when publishers get just as hurt.

1) You can loose, a lot, of revenue because of advertisers switching off.
2) You can void all your earnings if Google detects fradulant clicks (say a compeditor clicks the hell out of your ads).

It does suck for publishers and advertisers, but as it is one of Google's (and others) major revenue sources then I would have thought they would take even more measures to make sure this kind of fraud didn't happen. Because at the end of the day they do rely on both publishers and advertisters. And if it turns to crap Google (etc) will no longer be the middle man.

What about folks who play by the rules?

While most of the slashdotters laughed [slashdot.org] at my christmas lights/webcam hoax [komar.org], there were a handful (probably fueled by the insinuations in the press reporting) that claimed I cleaned up on my Google Adsense Ads. Nothing could be further from the truth (I'm not quiting my day job!) which I document in my media updates [komar.org] and I was operated totally by the rules of the program as documented in my two cents on Google Adsense. [komar.org]

So while YES, there is a lot of fraud in this area, be careful about saying everyone running Google Adsense is "bad"

Hilarity ensues!

To me, it's absolutely hilarious that much time and money is being spent to figure out how to improve a business model that's fundamentally idiotic.

Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

I simply never understood why the metric for web ads are so different from the metric for all other media ads. I mean in newspapers and television and magazines, the advertisers pays for the potential to reach the viewing or subscriber base. It is possible to guess how good these campaigns are doing, but the continuation of the campaign is often based on demographics, not how many people come in and say, hey, I saw your ad on Survivor and wanted to pick up your product. Advertisers want to create a personal connection to the consumer, and this is done by sponsoring content the target consumer desires.

Now it could be said that web advertising is more like direct mail. A firm pays an ad agency to create copy, the post office to send stuff out, and hopes for enough responses to the campaign to generate the profit. If the campaign fails, maybe the ad agency receives some flack. But the post office is not going to refund money because several hundred of the recipients happened to work for a competitor, or because a third of the envelopes were discarded unopened.

So where did this concept of one click one sale, or one click one payment. What happened to the concept of sponsoring good content in the hopes of generating a connection to potential customers. By all accounts TV and print ads are increasingly worthless. Can web ads be any worse? Could the problem be that the ad agencies or advertisers are not taking time to understand the medium? Are all web advertisers so fly by night that they need a sale today because tomorrow they will have run off to tahiti with the receipts?

WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

>click fraud is the bane of the search advertising industry

Click fraud is the bane of the USELESS CLICK-THRU ADVERTISING industry. Use targetted banners, of both online and offline products. Get smarter, dammit.

If I see a coke ad on a hot sunny day, i'm more eager to buy it than to click a stupid "punch the monkey" ad.

How about this. In say, long scientific article, who the heck will pay attention to a banner on the top of the page, rather than in the middle?

Common sense, boys. You wanted instant revenue. There's no such thing.

Beware of the "Content" network in Adwords

I've used google adwords for a couple small campaigns. I suspect that I've been a victim of "click fraud" on the content network -- that's where your ads appear on third party websites. However, on the Google search network, the only entity who directly benefits from clicks is Google themselves. I'm pretty comfortable with the traffic I get from the search clicks.

Re:3rd world countries

I'm not quite sure about the sweatshop type model, but I have read about a few places that have a lot of people just clicking on ads for a few hours a day. I guess it's similar to the "hit the monkey and win" type ad click racket, except people actually g

Re:3rd world countries

I think you're on to something with the "hit the monkey" model. If you think about it, Google click fraud has a lot in common with crapflooding Slashdot. In both cases, you have a malicious user trying to do something (e.g. post a comment or click on an ad) far more times in a short period of time than any legitimate user ever would. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game. The difference is that with Google ads, the stakes are much higher, and the techniques used (both by the malicious users and the site trying to stop them) are more sophisticated.

An obvious thing to look for is lots of traffic coming from the same IP or subnet. That's why Slashdot has IP bans, makes you wait 2 minutes before posting another comment, etc. Google of course can look for similar patterns. Therefore malicious users need to make their traffic look like it's coming from all over the place instead of just one computer. The GNAA used to crapflood Slashdot by compiling lists of hundreds of open proxies and writing a script to have them post comments all at once (Slashdot no longer allows open proxies to post). We can assume Google filters out ad clicks from anonymous proxies. So now the malicious users need a way to recruit hundreds of computers, preferably from lots of different subnets, and without using open proxies. You can do this by paying people to click ads from their computers, and "hit the monkey" is probably the cheapest known way to do this. If you're making more money on clicks than what you're paying your army of clickers, you'll make a profit.

Now, I suppose you could also write an automated program to do the same thing, but that would be called a "virus" or a "worm," and these things tend to attract a lot of attention from various law enforcement agencies. Better to pay people a couple cents to hit the monkey than go to prison.

Re:Cycle.

Phantom clicks > No Sales > Advertisers Decrease > Price Per Click Drops > Google goes bust > Phantom Clicks Stops...

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

Do you realize ads subsidize and offset a lot of costs for the consumer?

Yeah, like Google and television. And not much else. Now, since we are paying for cable in any event, I doubt the cable company would have trouble surviving without the ad revenue. And as far as Google is concerned, there were search engines before anyone ever thought about running an internet company based on ad revenue. They got their money elsewhere. Also, Google is the only successful internet business with an ad-based revenue model. Dotcom is long dead, remember?

Oh, and don't forget, it's the consumer who ends up paying for the ad campaign, which more than offsets the offsets to the costs of the consumer that you are talking about.

If you ask me, all advertising should be made illegal. Starting with spam, of course. I doubt the economy would ever even notice. Of course, the parasites in the advertising industry will have to go find real jobs!

OK, enough trolling, time to go read "Das Kapital".