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Google Battles Fraudulent Clicks
hthb writes "Google admits on CNN Money that fraudulent clicks are becoming a very large problem for them. 'A top Google official said that growing abuse of the company's lucrative sponsored ad-search model jeopardizes the popular Internet search engine's business. "I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said Wednesday.'" We had an earlier story about attempted extortion.
i click my google ads all the time. is that considered fradulent? hell, no one else is gonna click an ad.
Well, part of it is because their click-throughs are just so lucrative. I mean, I'll click on an AdSense link of my friend's with every new IP I use. (i.e. wherever I go) That's just a few cents a click, but it really adds up.
However, we've yet to see just how aggressively the adjustment affects the amount he's getting paid. We'll see.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's an easy fix... pay per unique visit, per time period that you care to filter by. In other words, the same person clicking 1 time per minute's no good,but up to 2 times per day is worth money to me. I agree that pay-per-click sounds like it's doing exactly what it should -- paying for EVERY CLICK. What the hell is a fradulent click? It sounds like they should be caring more about Unique visitors up to a certain number of visits per day, or sales, etc.
stuff |
As much as I like Google, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them on this one. What did they expect?
I'm guessing you are refering to a failed advertising business model?
Advertising, as good as it is by how many mouthes that it feeds, has gotten pretty annoying over the years. Its particularly annoying since the pseudo-science that is attempted to be applied to advertising.
The way I see it, there are currently only 2 forms of advertising that have any kind direct feedback to the "effectiveness" of the advertising. 1) TV comercials that advertise the $19.95 gizmo with $7.50 shipping and handling and the unknown cost of extra crap that the phone salesman pushes on you. Trust me, when the calls stop, so do the ads on TV. 2) Web comercials that get "click" values or "page view" values.
The later ones have gotten to be annoying. These have lead to the fun that we have on the web today. Obnoxious animated crap that you almost want to click on just to see it stop. A few years ago, popups were a big advertsising "page view" feature. We all know the drill.
The problem is that the feedback from web ads either by click throughs or page views has little to no correlation to selling crap and the new pseudo-science marketing types think the feedback is something real to the outside world, and they will do _anything_ to increase these numbers to some arbitrary number that is higher than it was the last time they measured it.
I'm sorry guys, there is nothing really there with these data. You need to go back to your companies that you work for and treat web ads like regular TV, magazine, and newspaper ads. They provide name recognition, establish some kind of emotional value to their product, etc. But the data from ads mean nothing.
I'm shocked that as smart as the people at google are have fallen into this myth. I'm guessing that they have always had some kind of stress associated how they were going to make money off of thier incredible services, but by billing people with arbitrary clicks on a world-wide available webpage that can be "clicked" by anything or anyone at anytime in the world at any time has its obvious drawbacks.
I say go back to thinking that advertising is just advertising and not some real game that can be won. As much as I and everyone else hates advertising, it must be a pretty cool job. You get to work on a neverending stream of short term projects that are pretty much only limited by your imagination. That has to be fun for you, it sucks for us, but it does pay many paychecks, and it looks like we are stuck with it at some level.
Now for the important stuff!
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
You GOTTA have more cow bell!
Actually it is back. Looks like they reverted back to the old version today....
I think I've posted this story like 5 times now on Slashdot, usually every time a story like this comes around. I guess I'll tell it one more time.
:-/
I made a program to make fraudulent clicks for a customer who was being attacked by a fradulent company. The company created a similiar looking domain name and just ripped his entire site and put it on there.
He was going through lawyers to stop this guy but it was taking a long time. He saw that the guy was advertising on google (right above him). So I created a program that got a list of anonymous proxies from a site, then it would randomly choose a proxy, then pick a random interval, and a random referrer (from a list), and a random browser tag. Anyway, using this program we could click on his ad-word hundreds of times a day, costing him money and making the "bad-guy" max his limit for the day.
I was actually pretty shocked that it worked, so I gave my client his money back and emailed google about it. I talked with a few people at google including a higher level technical guy. I described my method and he thanked me, and I've never heard from him again.
Moral of the story... none really, but I don't think these fraudulent clicks can be stopped. This is another case of a company who's business model is pretty much destroyed because of the anonymity of the internet.
I need a new story to tell
-- D3X
Sorry, BCentral among other sites have tried that and have not done so hot.
I say so what. As an example $1 per click (assuming every click is 'real'). 1000 clicks = $1000. $0.50 per click (assuming 50% of clicks are real). 2000 clicks = $1000. You still pay the same amount for the number of "real" clicks.
I think Google may be doing this as a negotiating point, so that advertisers won't try and get lower rates.
Probably start charging for gMail and put other, more obtrusive ads (a la Yahoo!, MSN, etc...) all over their search results and other web apps...
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
If I have a class c address I can get 255 clicks. If I make a web page about mesothelioma, those clicks are worth up to $165 per click which I'll probably see $10 to $20 of that money. Thats a lot of cash. After I burn the first class C, I'll just get another class C. Now If i have a 100 Zombie PCs sitting on internet connections with DHCP, I can get 100 click over however long their DHCP IP lease is. Personally, I don't like google adwords. It works great googles website, put allowing people to put it on their website makes very open to fraud. I know experimenting with overture ads, I recieved 0 conversions with ads on people's websites but around 10 to 20% conversion on if its displayed on the actual search results.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
What I think is bigger news, but less known is the Google Sandbox Effect. It seems that Google may be broken, because they are no longer able to calculate PageRank across 8 billion pages. They stopped doing their monthly updates earlier this year. Some people think the Sandbox Effect is a result of Google being broken, and some people think it is a tool to drive up Adwords clicks.
One of the problems that I've personally found is that Google takes a zero tolerance approach to clickthrough abuse. One of my own sites, which depended in part on the clickthrough revenue (fairly modest) was one day 'barred' from AdSense though despite communications back and forth with the AdSense team, they refused to explain their reasons for removal, nor provide any evidence or details that might have helped us identify the culprit/deal with it and/or prove our innocence.
What annoys me most of all is the fact that I cannot clear my own site's good name and reputation, despite being almost certain that the abuse (if that's what it was) must have originated outwith our own organisation.
In fairness to Google, I'm sure they have to be seen to take a hard-line on perceived offenders, but the danger is that they are also taking a hard-line on sites such as mine whose revenue stream has been cut without a fair trial or explanation.
In this instance, Google Is Not Your Friend.
Post-Adsense, I have a dim view of Google's methods at least where advertising is concerned. However, it remains the best search engine and I wish it all the best, but I was deeply disappointed in the way they refused to extend the courtesy of an explanation and failed to provide any evidence that might have helped us identify what happened and its source.
Bad Google. Bad, bad Google.
John
In my teenager years, I often participated in political and party ad campaigns. This was before the age of the internet and electronic advertising. So I went out with my friends, in a minibus, to paste posters in the streets. We got paid for it. It was a very pleasant war, between youth "gangs". All you had to do was to paste as many posters over the other party's posters, or rip theirs off, to bankrupt them faster than your own party. Those who held out longest and were best organized, won. This was all very legal.
The lesson I learned was that the best strategy is to paste ("click") your competition into bankruptcy. We often succeeded in convincing rival pasters to throw away their posters ("click their own ads"), and we would then pay them part of our money.
What's your point again?
Why don't advertisers track *sales* that come in through google as a separate channel from the rest of the web? Then, google gets a percentage of the stuff that's actually sold. I think that's fair, and it would do away with fraud altogether.
Whenever there's fraud like this going on, the first question I ask myself is, where's the money flowing? The disconnect here is that advertisers are expecting some percentage of click-thrus to generate revenue, and the fraudsters are taking advantage of that by artificially inflating the click-thru-but-don't-buys. Do away with the assumption, and the fraudsters would have no way to attack it.
Couldn't a company simply lie and say that it sold less of its products via the google than it actually did? I guess...but who's trusting who right now to keep accurate track of the click-thrus?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Alright, It's a little complex, but not too much.
Problem: proxies
Solution: Google has enough power that they could easily actively scan for open proxies
Problem: Competitor clicks multiple times using his/her browser on the ad.
Solution: Check the IP address, use a cookie, check the referrer. Only charge ONCE for multiple clicks. This alone may save many advertisers.
Problem:User uses multiple referred URLS.
Solution: Verify that the ad WAS placed on that page.
Problem: user deletes cookies using an automated program.
Solution: check the IP address. Verify the referred URL
Problem: Google isn't currently doing jack for advertisers
Solution: As an advertiser check your logs. Verify that your clicks are ligitimate interested users. (i.e. cookies, javascript code which records time spent at the website, number of impression from AdSense and search results vs. number of ligitimate users.)
I have a website which provides a free service to the community (alumni website). Almost every legitimate user who clicks on the Ad registers for the service. This site is only for one school and as a result, I had very few clicks per impression for Adsense ads, but incredibly high click per impressions for search results. I have incredibly targeted ads. One day I noticed that my clicks from adsense had gone up alot, but my user registration did not go up proportionately. As a result, I discontinued my adsense ads and only used search related ads. Lesson learned, AdSense may not be all its cracked up to be.
There's no place like ~/
So if a company like Micro$oft buys google ads, then if a whole boatload of people search google for microsoft, google gets a huge check from Bill G.
If the