Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks

An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks.""

Comments

Re:Open secret?

[AuraBorealis]

You would hate to see it if commercially supported websites disappeared. I don't know what percentage of Slashdot's revenue comes from ads versus paying subscribers, but you'd better believe that all this bandwidth we burn up all day long has to be paid for by somebody.

Ads are like taxes.. they support the things that people want to use but don't want to pay for.

-B

One answer is simple...

[bje2]

the answer to one of the three cases in there is simple...the cost-per-click payment model is eventually going to go away...what's gonna replace it? i dunno...if i knew that, i could probably be a marketing exec for google...

seriously though...this doesn't solve the problem of judging how popular a link it, by how much traffic it gets (since much of the traffic can be false), but it does solve the "drive-by-clicking" technique that can cost companies money...

You saw it here first.

[Underholdning]

Here's an idea. Don't charge per click but per sale generated. The advertizer is happy, because he gets what he pays for. Google is happy, because the customer pays for what they get. There wouldn't be any idea in boosting up the click rate, and fraud would be virtually impossible.

Re:You saw it here first.

[myspys]

and if the advertise doesn't sell anything?

if they want to generate traffic to a page where you can download a paper which might generate a sale, which takes place via phone and take weeks to complete?

if google switched over to CPA they'd lose a looooot of money

Re:You saw it here first.

[evilviper]

Don't charge per click but per sale generated.

Which then gives the advertisers incentive to trick people into comming to their site.

Then, they get nobody buying the product advertized, BUT they get more recognition, etc.

In fact, I don't like click-counting at all... only views. Why should the web-page designer be held repsonsible because the advertiser makes crappy ad-banners, or tries to sell junk products?

Do you get to pay for TV ads based on the number that go out and buy the product? No. You pay for your chance to display your ad to X number of people, and it's up to the advertisers to create an effective ad, as well as advertising the products they THINK people want to buy.

As WWW ads currently exist, there's a lot of burden on the site operator, for no good reason.

Re:You saw it here first.

[tigre]

I had that thought myself. Doubtless Google has as well. But they haven't gone with it, probably for some of the reasons below.

One problem is that even in the best case Google's revenue is then dependent on how good the site is at following through and making the sale. They don't want to give people prominent advertising real estate just to louse it up when people click through. This could be mitigated over long term campaigns by giving preference to those who are actually successful in returning profits to them, but for smaller operations in niche markets, that's not going to be so successful.

And how does Google track to make sure that they are getting paid for sales? Once you're off their site, they don't have too much control over what happens. Maybe they could come up with a way of keeping the selling within the Google system, but that's a pretty big can of worms to try to open up.

And what about sites that aren't selling exactly but are paying to advertise ideas? Or their "sales" is a bit more loosely defined than a single payment for a product or service, taken care of at that moment over the web? A restaurant might advertise on Google, but you're not going to order and pay over the web. You go to the restaurant, and Google never gets any credit or money for it.

Anyway, the most likely outcome of going with this idea would be that Google still gets screwed, though this time it's by the advertisers rather than the clickers.

Re:Open secret?

[AstroDrabb]

There is a good way and a bad way to do ads. Google does ads right IMO. Simple and clear text ads. I block pop-ups and flash ads with Firefox. If someone wants to advertise to me, then it has to be on my terms.

Imagine if a new "no change" bit was put on all tv sets so that when a commercial came on that you did not like, you were not able to change the channel? I have two little children and when smut tv ads come on, the channel is changed.

There are too many pr0n and gimmick ads on the net. I don't mind targeted ads, for example, tech ads on /. I don't mind, though I don't care for graphical and/or flash ads and usually block them. Another thing to keep in mind with text based ads are that they are very hard to block, especially if the server grabs the text ad and sends down the HTML, then you cannot block by server such as *servedby.*.

It is not the job of consumers to keep a business or business model afloat. It is the businesses job to make sure they are changing to meet demand. If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.

This could be big

[WallaceSz]

Advertising is Google's main revenue stream, so any sort of fraud would be taken seriously.

No doubt fradusters will keep dreaming up more innovative schemes to get this done. I wonder if the Google API could be used towards this goal or in fighting it. Perhaps by setting up a Google Alert to search for fraud schemers, the good guys can stay a step ahead.

Is it a secret? Or simply an urban legend?

[Junks Jerzey]

It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc.

Hard references, please! If you don't have any, then we know this is an urban legend. The big flaw in this theory is that it would be much cheaper and simpler to simply write a little program to send the HTTP requests than to have people clicking on links. It would be like paying people to copy text off of web pages when you could just print it out instead.

I Have To Ask

[the_mad_poster]

At what point do all these stupid marketers wake up and say 'Oh, gee... the internet was not created to be a worldwide marketplace, it was created to share information and we attempted to usurp it. Maybe we should have thought of that before we stuck our greedy fists into a network we didn't understand.'

I couldn't a shit less about the problems all these stupid marketers face. The Internet is meant to share information, it's not meant to be a global market. That's the reason you have all these problems with spam and abuse of the traditional marketing mechanisms - it's a system to share information with minimal checks and balances.

Re:Open secret?

[Eivind]

Not at all. In the contrary, advertising has a lot of externalities.

Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.

However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.

Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.

Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;

You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.

We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?

Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.

If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.

Re:To All The People Worried About Ad Fraud...

[pandrijeczko]

Well I think we should all care since quite a bit of the net is driven by ads.

My approach to advertising is very black & white:

1. Corporations rip us off by lying to us through advertisements. If someone rips off the corporations with some ingenuity and stays within the law then good luck to them with my blessing.

2. I turn on my TV, there's adverts. I turn on my radio, there's adverts. I read a magazine or newspaper, there's adverts. I buy a DVD and at the beginning there's trailers (=adverts). Hell, I even fill my car up at the petrol station and if I don't look at the TV screen overhead playing adverts at me, I stare down at the petrol pump nozzle and on the 3" diameter circle on the top, there's an... wait for it... advert (usually for a bar of chocolate).

Hey, I'm a capitalist scum consumer just like the rest of you but if my girlfriend went on at me as much as advertisements do, I'd have left her by now.

My greatest fear is not death but arriving at the gates of Heaven only to see a "Sponsored by Coca Cola sign on them."

Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud

[DeadSea]

Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud.

Advertisers don't care about clicks. They care about conversions. Advertisers want people to come to their site and then open the wallet. A conversion is somebody that came to the site and then bought something. Advertisers measure the success of the campain by the net profit. That means they track how many people converted and then figure out how much a click is worth to them statistically. If a campaign was sucessful, they want to continue the campaign. In the best case for Google, they want to expand the campaign or would be willing to pay more for the campaign.

While it might be in Google's short term interest to have fraudulent clicks, it is not in their long term interest. They will lose advertisers who have to pay for fake clicks because the advertisers are tracking it.

Re:Open secret?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I don't mind ads. What I mind (and tend to block) are ads that interfere with my ability to read the web site content that I want to read, or mess with my browser/computer working the way I want it to. This includes everything mentioned above (spyware, popups, flash, tracking cookies, etc.) as well as ad servers that can't keep up and stall things. I can't count the number of times I've been stuck waiting for some poor server at doubleclick to send something so that the page would finish rendering.

Re:To All The People Worried About Ad Fraud...

[pandrijeczko]

You only need to look at fast food advertisements to see blatant lies - how come you never get served a burger that looks as big & juicy in the advert?...

Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...

Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...

A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...

Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...

If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.

Re:Open secret?

[Technician]

google's approach is fairly good for people who are trying to find something and just get annoyed by irrelevant ads.


I second that. I lost a keyring while on a cross contry hike. The chances of finding them are very slim. They are somewhere in about a 1 mile square wooded area with no trails and lots of underbrush.

I was apalled by the price the dealer wanted for a replacement transponder key and remote. It took some weeding out of the Google results, but I found programming instructions online. Keys varied from $18 to $125 each online. Remotes were about double that. I bought the keys (I got an extra spare) and remote online for less than what the dealer wanted for 1 key. (over $60) The dealer wanted over $150 for the remote. I did the programming myself and had a key shop cut the keys for $1.00 each. Google saved me over $140 for the keys and remote. Needless to say, stuff I wasn't looking for was just in the way. If you are advertising, show up in a search and in good reviews. (yes I check history, discussion boards, and BBB) I'm not a easy target for online fraud. Advertising mobile locksmith services when I'm searching for key blanks is useless. (Nice try Streetkeys) When I need a mobile locksmith, I'll search for one.

Hats off to Coastal Tech for having all the programming information online for the keys and remote for the Prius. Thanks for the affordable keys.

Same thing when I'm looking for bulk inkjet ink, don't advertise your refilled cartridges. I'm looking for supplies to do it myself. Show up in revelant searches, not anything remotely related. It'll save you advertising dollars and me time weeding out the cruft.

Google's ads have teo more important features

[Sycraft-fu]

RELIVANCE and HONESTY. So many sites just slather any and every ad they can get. Well this has two problems: First, most of the ads are just for shit I don't want. I have no intrest in it, so I just start filtering the ads out. Second, and probably more importantly, so many of the ads are scam-like in nature. Punch the money and win, you have a waiting message, block popups (in a popup ad), etc.

Well with Google's ads, espically the ones on Google itself, I find them highly relivant and honest. When I search for something, a list of companies that want to sell me that thing pop up on the right hand side. In fact, that's how I find shops to buy things, quite frequently.

I wanted a Bogen tripod. I had used them, and was quite happy with the quality. Problem: I do not know where one gets Bogen tripods. So I use Google. On the left was informational links, such as Bogen's own site, on the right was a whole list of pro video shops happy to sell me Bogen tripods. I browsed a couple shops, chose one, and bought the tripod.

Google holds the record for being the only ad provider that I've ever clicked through and immediatly bought something. Others I've clicked on for intrest (I do from /. once and a while) but only on Google have I gone straight to buying, and I've done so on many occasions. Reason is that the Google ads are completely relivant to what I want, so when I'm in buy mode, they instantly provide me with places selling what I'm interested in.