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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.
How about ending the advertising? I wouldn't miss it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Google needs to not just police fraudulent clicks, but their own counting system. My dad tried their system to promote a fledgling e-commerce site for his wife's business. In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks. Thing is, his web host reported only about 300 hits on his home page. This is not how many clicks from Google were in his referrer log. This was total traffic from all sources.
He complained and Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation about referrer logs and that he may not be able to accurately track how many visitors were coming from them. Since he's a busy lawyer and the time it would take to fight Google for maybe $60-100 would take way more time than it was worth, he just quit using Google.
But you can't even attribute this to fraudulent clicks. Even if Google was his sole source of traffic (which it wasn't), nearly 25% of the clicks they were reporting and billing for weren't reaching his site. And this is based solely on comparing clicks to the number of successful server requests for his homepage.
I've used the same host he has and their downtime isn't even 0.25%, much less 25%.
Draw your own conclusions, but I think even if Google eradicated fraudulent clicks, their ad program would still be a huge scam.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Bring back the 'search by date', and we promise to behave ourselves =)
Google decides they'll pay people based on clicks, and people realize that all they've got to do is click the link to get paid.
This was OBVIOUSLY going to happen. Anyone remember AllAdvantage? If you pay someone to do a job that's so easily automated, you can BET someone's going to automate it and ask for all your money.
The solution is simple. STOP PAYING for clicked links! If your business model sucks and is inherently flawed, CHANGE IT. Don't bitch that you're getting taken advantage of.
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."
"THEN DON'T DO THAT!"
Seriously. I have been a google fan for a long time, like most slashdotters, but this press release just makes me sad. This may officially be the first Truly Stupid statement I've heard from the people of Google.
I'm choosing to see this as a sign that the end times are near. There are still plenty of smart people at google, but someone started letting idiots in, too.
So, it would be wrong for us to try to /. the University of Pheonix 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.
On the one hand, the companies are paying for "clicks". Unless the contract is explicit about what constitutes a "click", it sounds like they're paying for clicks. And what the heck is a "fraudulent click"? I mean, how do you fake a click?
Reyes, speaking at an investor conference sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston, was referring to an illegal practice known as "click fraud" that occurs when individuals click on ad links that appear next to search results in order to force advertisers to pay for the clicks.
I have trouble understanding how this is "illegal". Certainly unethical, but that's not the same thing.
I mean, as an advertiser, you enter into an agreement that you will use this "pay-per-click" model to promote your product. Obviously, this can be tampered with by having someone click your link non-stop. But what constitutes "too many" clicks? If I'm a small business, I can be hurt by even a fraction of clicks that some of the larger corporations can get.
I can see how Google has to take some steps to prevent people from doing this. I can also see how advertisers have to be more aware of this problem. But how exactly is it "illegal" for me to, say, repeatedly click on a link? The people who sponsored that link -- who agreed that they would sell their product via "pay per click" -- knew this and went ahead with it anyway. Can I be indicted for fraud charges for clicking 1,000,000 times? How about 100,000? How about 1,000? Or 100?
Unethical, but why illegal?
This lamenting about their ineffective and easily-exploited business model sounds very similar to the whining we all love to hate by certain media industry groups, doesn't it?
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
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 |
*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*
What was the story? I wasn't paying attention
Microsoft has ordered over ten million new mice and trackballs for their central offices.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Actually there is no problem: A company can easily determine how many click-throughs from Google eventually lead to sales, and thus assign a dollar value to their presence in Google. Now they divide this total value by the number of click-throughs reported by Google (even if said number is totally bogus) and that is exactly what they bid for in adwords.
The CFO is just not familiar enough with the basic economic behaviour.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, in my view, always seemed to be more a fad anyways.
... an example can be seen here:
... many advertisers, in particular larger ones it seems, recognize the value of impression advertising and branding.
Impression based advertising, or even better yet a hybrid of flat-rate advertising priced based on an estimated, not guaranteed, number of impressions expected during a particular period of time, such over the course of a month.
Prime example of this type of pricing scheme is seen with traditional magazine advertising. I personally have been using a similar pricing setup for years for various on-line services I operate
Marihemp Network Ad Pricing Info:
http://www.marihemp.com/advertising/
Long time visitors to the Marihemp Network sites know clicking on ads is pointless *unless* they truly are interested in the product/service advertised, and advertisers know upfront what their costs are - don't have to worry about their ads ending prematurely nor unexpected ad cost overruns.
And from an operational standpoint, selling flatrate advertising, as explained above, is much easier to manage both now, as well as well into the future.
On a related item, even if a visitor is interested in a specific product/service, that doesn't mean the visitor is ready to buy right then and there
Ron Bennett
How about ending the advertising? I wouldn't miss it.
Yes, this is a good idea. To replace it they should have a button that says "Get Free Pizza". And when you click on it, then someone will deliver free pizza to your address within 10 minutes.
How about ending the advertising? I wouldn't miss it.
There are a huge number of (non-commercial) sites out there that depend on adsense to keep running, generally speaking it is at least possible to cover server costs alone for a reasonably high traffic site with adsense.
This is why personally I've never understood why people run things like 'Adblock' to block out all adverts (other than in the case of annoying pop-unders etc) - these adverts are most likely what pay for the site you are viewing.
I think that Google AdSense (if that's what they're talking about) is worth protecting... it is a lucrative system. I think that Google is being fair with their payout to advertisers -- personally their statistics look consistent to me; 4000 page views at my site versus the 3000 page views acknowledged through Google (not everyone has javascript enabled). Also the revenue I've collected from Google has been superior to other ad systems.
I think Google is fair to its ad publishers.
Well Google has all these geniuses they keep hiring from MIT, I'm sure they can fix up a way to detect likely click abuses. It's not rocket science, after all.
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!
It's an easy fix... pay per unique visit, per time period that you care to filter by.
Right. And how do you propose to track unique visits. By IP address? Then what about the AOL proxy caches? Also, a large percentage of these are probably robots. They can play all sort of tricks with cookies.
This is a difficult problem.
The only time this hurts google is through their adsd on other websites. Say a scammer puts google ads on his website, then automates clicking on those ads, google then has to pay him for a portion of each click. This hurts google obviously.
Ads on google.com only hurt the advertiser, and as someone mentioned, they knew the deal when they signed up. Each click, fraudulent or not, is unlikely to become a sale.
I suspect that the proportion of fraudulent clicks used to hurt antoher company (by raising their advertising costs) is small compared to the number of scammers trying to make money by hosting google ads. I don't know the proportion of revenue google makes onsite vs. ads hosted on other site, but it would seem off-site ads may have to be stopped until a better business model can be figured out.
Spencer Ogden
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
Pretty soon it'll be "consumer fraud" to enter a store and leave without buying anything!
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.
The problem is that the people committing the "fraud" are also extremely sophisticated, since, as I said, billions of dollars are on the line. Check out this article, for example, which explains one form of fraud:
You can't catch a highly distributed, highly random army of low-wage people in India and China without generally filtering out clicks from those places. But then what about ads that are highly popular in those areas (say, for the India Times?)? They get a free ride.
Bottom line is, when you involve billions of dollars in an industry that's as open to gaming as this one, you're going to get people who go to extreme lengths to defraud your system. They'll write adware that randomly distributes clicks around the globe that is indistinguishable from real traffic. They'll hire armies of underpaid workers around the globe to do it manually.
Another point to consider is that the on-line adult industry, which collectively often finds innovative solutions to problems, has evolved from paying affiliates (sponsors) on a per click basis to other methods, such as pay per signup (pay per action) and revenue sharing.
... so far they've been able to hide the extent/absorb the cost of excess/duplicate clicks, but Google can't forever, especially in a post-IPO environment.
...
...
... or combination of IP, cookie, etc; the permutations are endless!
... what about folks, such as those with limited time, using an automated shopping script/website/applet to shop on-line vendors on their behalf.
... for example pay folks who opt-in like 1 cent one-time for each unique link they click in such emails.
... Google should be looking at alternatives, if they're not already, to PPC advertising.
In a nutshell, if the adult industry, as a whole, can't make pay per click work, why does Google think they can?
While the solution may seem simple to many folks, when one examines the issue in-depth, there's nothing simple about it
* What constitutes a "valid" click?
* What constitutes a duplicate click?
* How many clicks from a source is too many?
* How does one define a "source" of a click?
* Filter clicks based on IP, Computer, User ID, Cookie, etc?
* How does one deal with proxies, such as folks coming in on AOL?
* What is the threshold for filtering? Allow one click per IP per day?, or per hour?, etc
* Assuming a click is considered valid, is it truly valid? -getting into the issue of bots, etc.
* Are bots ok? Seems obvious they wouldn't be, but no so fast
* Is sending emails to friends (say double opt-in even) with pay per click (affiliate) links in them ok? -then further, is asking them to click on such links ok?; a growing underground web business is built around such an approach
I could go on and on
Ron Bennett
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?
You're talking about the ads that display when you do a Google search. If you click your links, you screw yourself.
We're talking about Google's Ad affiliate program that you can put OTHER PEOPLE'S ADS on YOUR website, which you recieve a portion of the income.
If you click those links, Google pays you.
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
Look this really isn't such a big deal. The worst case scenario is that google cannot charge per click but has to use some other metric to determine fees, either flat, per "presentation" or some other related metric.
Why is pay per click good? Well there can be only two reasons;
(1) It lowers the legitimate threshold of entry to make affordable something that would otherwise be unaffordable. In other words by using pay per click they can offer a service to someone who would otherwise be unable to afford it
(2) It enables Google to generate extraordinary profits (ie overcharge).
If someone is happy to pay per click because there is some "perception" that a click is something inherently valuable then the fact that these clicks are becoming (or have become) less valuable is merely a correction that returns adWords to the standard advertising channels where "viewers" are the only statistical measure available. However, if the real reason that Google cares is (2) then they deserve nothing.
In fact even if clicks become valueless, there are many other metrics that Google can use that will mean they can be even more precise with their pricing model than the broadcast advertisers. Things like page views per geographical region or service provider etc etc etc.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
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.
Say a scammer puts google ads on his website, then automates clicking on those ads, google then has to pay him for a portion of each click. This hurts google obviously.
Wrong. If Google thinks the clicks are genuine and pays out, that means Google gets paid by the advertiser. Google is never paying from its own pocket - the advertiser pays out and Google takes a nice cut of the price.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Google advertising is like ads in the yellow pages. You don't have any problem with ads there, do you? You see ads for what you're searching for.
I've gone to google LOOKING for the ads when I wanted to find the major companies that sold an esoteric product I was interested in seeing. There are places where ads are relevant, and this is one of them.
So, on that note, I have a solution for them: they keep track of surfing habits for click-throughs by giving advertisers a monitoring program to run. Abnormal click patterns would indicate fraud.
This would almost always work because for fraud to be effective, it requires lots and lots of clicks without purchases, which means you'll see the same IP address/block click-in and then die. Maybe they'll even click on some other things, but they still won't buy anything. Going to the same purchase site 40 times in an hour without buying anything is wierd.
They could also do that thing they do with internet sign ups: give an image that is machine-unparsable and require users who wish to click through to type in the values it indicates. It doesn't even have to be that secure; a single value would be enough. Any IP that has too many failures at this could be locked out.
Then again, that would keep google from selling to advertisers who sell anything for the blind...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I have a right to know who is advertising on my blog. I was black and had a website that talked about being black, I would be very upset if the KKK advertised on my website. I know that is an extreme example. I also am interested in who is advertising on my site. I have a reasonable excuse for clicking my own links.
"brxref
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 ~/
That'a the branding style of advertising.
Some of us work off the model of # sold = function of (predisposed-to-buy interested demographic * conversion to buyer-factor of tested ad * number of correct demographic exposed to the ad). The PPC model slots perfectly into this - as long as we're getting the demographic we pay for through targetted keywords and such. Note that this model is fairly iterative as you can refine your customer demographic model and the offer you're making in your ad.
Caveat: this model does NOT work as well in saturated mass markets as in small business and niche markets - and it depends on your ability to do statistical analysis of your sales and sort out your customer profiles to the point where you can stop annoying people with no interest in your core product line with ads for them. For a somewhat fictional example - you don't advertise discount dog food on a site dedicated to pedigree siamese cat breeding, because the audience is all wrong or in the wrong frame of mind even if they're otherwise in your target demographic.
That's why the PPC advertising model is so valuable - because it lets you bypass a few steps and advertise directly based on the interest - > searched_for_keyword matchup.
Somewhat relevant example - is an ad for the latest gamer gear more likely to result in a sale if you put it on Slashdot compared to Accounting Today?
Both the branding and the direct marketing models play off one another of course- you can have a strong brand sold through DM too, or a weak brand can do well when targetted to a smaller niche.