How Google Manages Click Fraud

Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.

Enron

[MyLongNickName]

If ad-sense is its major source of money, and it keeps the underlying numbers pretty well buried, could we be looking at another Enron? Imagine it comes out that 90% of all clicks are fraudulent. How many advertizers leave? How badlu does the stock drop? This is one of the things that makes me nervous about Google as an investment. Remember, Enron was loved by Wall Street too. Enron did not produce anything physical either. Enron reported great numbers. Underlying numbers were hidden away.

How is Google diferent that the big "E"?

Re:Enron

[ubergenius]

While I agree with you in principle that Google is an uneasy investment (which is why, although I love everything Google, I have yet to invest in them), I must protest the comparison to Enron. While it is always possible that I am wrong, I get the distinct impression that Google is much more forthcoming and honest about their situation than Enron. When Enron tanked, it was because of a deliberate and illegal practice of doctoring their financial situation. I highly doubt Google is doing the same thing.

Furthermore, with the debut of Google Payments, and its eventual integration throughout the web, and its current ability to easily sell videos (of which many media companies have already jumped on board, such as ABC, NBC, etc.) with Google Video, and the possible announcement of an Office competitor (with Google Spreadsheets being the starting point), I think they will slowly begin diversifying their revenue, which will make them a much more appealing investment opportunity in the future.

Thinking about stuff

[ajs318]

I'm writing a piece of ad-blocking software myself, and I was actually thinking of incorporating a few features. Specifically, the option of whether not to download the advert at all; to download the advert without displaying it; or to download the advert without displaying it and download the linked page without displaying it. Is this last option an example of "click fraud"?

do not think much of click fraud detection system

[dino_russ]

Just a comment on their detection process. As a publisher who was terminated (and appeal denied) I do not believe in their process. I have a very active dinosaur website (approaches 1 million hits per month in school year -- probably lots of kids/teachers). it went well for one year then without notice (must be their autormated removal process) I was terminated for me or someother person associated with me generating what they classified as invalid clicks. Well I can state clearly i did not generate one invalid click, and I am only person doing website. So some other process was generating invalid clicks in their checking process. I am not sure what, whether with lots of activity I was getting those repeat 2 clicks that they filter out as invalid? Was there some spider clicking these (a competitor as I have heard about). All I maintain as a publisher I was terminated for nothing I did but was unfaily accused of doing invalid things. Does not make me very favorable to Google and their monolithic, unfair giant system. And I am happy to tell any one who asks what I think of their crummy system!!! Russ Jacobson Illinois State Geological Survey Champaign, IL

Re:Academic community

[bogado]

This is impossible, since fraudulent clicks can be in every aspect equal to true clicks. First there is no clear definition on what is a fraudulent click, google and the target site only see an ip, a user-agent among some other http fields and a timestamp of the time that several things were loaded and clicked.

One can argue that with some statistics one can find a site that is using automated clicking by using a network of infected computers. This would show as a unusual amout of clicking, but if the bad guy knows statistic he can gradually climb his click rate, and a non-fraudulent site could have a surge of users into clicking an add when he appears in slashdot, digg, boing-boing or any other high-trafic site that links other sites.

One can clearly separate some fraudulent clicks, if many users clicks the add in less then the time to read anything on the page for instance. Other possibility is when an ip clicks on thousands and thousands of adds in a few minutes, even if those adds are from diferent people.

In short, it is always possible to catch some fraud in this model, but if the fraud is clever enought there is no way it will be caught. Remember that even users that are non-afiliated to the site that want to support it and click the add could acount to a click fraud, and this is somewhat similar to a user who happens to find an add interesting.

Re:do not think much of click fraud detection syst

[perkr]

It sounds like you got a truly horrible treatment. An intersting question is whether the adword business model works at all given that fraudulent clicks can be generated for two opposite purposes and there does not seem to be a fair system to separate them: 1. Increasing website revenue, 2. Kill competitor - very efficient since there are few other advertising alternatives out there for small publishers.

Re:do not think much of click fraud detection syst

[TeeSee]

I too have experienced first hand the process of being terminated from google as a result of invalid page clicks. Any attempt to gain an explanation as to how the invalid clicks occured is met with standard form letters telling you that you can appeal but Google reserves the right to terminate anyone at anytime. It is really quite stupid as you have the option of appealing, but unless you know why you have been banned, as in where the clicks have occured, you have no hope of explaining any invalid clicks. Interesting to note that Google provides facility for you to control the ads that display on your site, but unless you are aloud to click on the ads it is very difficult to view the ads as clicking on them would no doubt cause invalid page clicks.