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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.
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.
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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!
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.