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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.
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.
But then who will pay for Google then? Somebody has to keep the power on at those server farms.
Um, how would we enjoy google then? I see the ads as pretty unobtriusive and have actively purchased items from them when I am looking for a product. For all that google gives us (thanks Gmail!) and their need to have a successful business for their shareholders and prospects for the future, they gotta get the renevue from somewhere. If it be ads that are a heck of a lot less obnoxious han most other ones (including ones see on /.) that keep google going, then I'm fine with it.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
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?
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
How about ending the advertising? I wouldn't miss it.
So you're happy to enter your credit card number on Google and any sites that use AdSense adverts to fund themselves?
I for one welcome Google's approach to adverts - it's a hell of a lot better than the completely untargetted, very annoying Flash, animated GIFs and popups that other advertisers use. Whats more, Google's targetted text ads are sometimes actually useful.
Everyone complains about adverts but obviously don't think about the economics - web sites have to fund themselves somehow, so either you're going to have to pay directly or put up with the ads. IMHO ads designed to be annoying and untargetted can be blocked without any problem but Google style ads are reasonably non-intrusive and targetted so you should allow them - you want to push the advertisers in the direction of sensible unobtrusive ads rather than forcing the sites to close down.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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
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!
Sure, and if he was Black, you'd call him a welfare cheat and talk about his love of fried chicken?
You don't know what kind of law he practices, who his clients are, and whether he helps the big guys crush little guys or helps little guys stand up to big guys.
A hammer can be used to build a house or bash in someone's skull. A law degree has good and bad uses as well.
There are a couple of words for the attitude in your comment... prejudice and bigotry.
And don't give me any mumbo jumbo about it being okay because there are so many bad lawyers. Under that logic, you can start justifying some really dangerous attitudes toward ethnic minorities so long as they meet some minimum arbitrary criteria you've set.
Hate is hate, no matter how you try to justify it.
Start a happiness pandemic
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
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.
There's a decent chance that Google was right and your Dad was wrong. A click-through link sends the browser first to Google (where the hit is counted), and then refers the browser to your Dad's URL.
What can happen is that your Dad's web page is cached somewhere--on the user's computer, a cache provided by the ISP, etc. Google's links defeat caches by including unique strings, precisely to ensure that every click is counted. Your Dad's URLs, on the other hand, look the same every time. As a result, the user's click is logged by Google, but then the page is loaded from a cached copy, without ever touching your Dad's server.
This scenario is extremely common, because users tend to visit sites more than once. If someone didn't bookmark your Dad's page, he probably used a Google search to find it again.
--Len.
Disclaimer: I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in any company that earns revenue from click-through ads.
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!
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.
We sell bike tours and have in the past had relationships with web sites that used the model described above. It's not always a case of intentional dishonesty -- it can be really hard to recognize whether a customer came from that site or not. But the most important problem is that it's not Google's fault if someone comes to look at our web site and doesn't buy -- they're being paid to deliver people who click on your ad because it interests them.
At least Google cares about this issue. I've actually received refund checks from Google for fraud reimbursement. Overture just downplays the issue and keeps taking our money. I'd stop using Overture altogether if it were my decision.
PPC advertising is gross, at first glance -- but it's really interesting to compare the ways Google and Overture implement the idea. Google is very good at making it clear what's paid and what's natural, while Overture (and their many affiliate sites) lets the boundary blur. It's that intentional blurring of the boundary between natural and paid results that smells foul. I think it's very similar to the notion of a boundary between editorial and advertising in a journalism setting.
If you're involved with PPC marketing and worried about fraud, make sure you realize who's your friend. I hope Google doesn't get a disproportionate share of the wrath here just because they spoke up about the problem. If it were up to Overture, nothing would ever get done about it.
6. Audible Alarm (not shown)
-from a Cuisinart product owner's manual.