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Newsweek On Click Fraud, Search Engine Response
prostoalex writes "Newsweek magazine says click fraud is the bane of the search advertising industry. Google and Yahoo! are apparently working on the standardized definition of a "good-faith" click in order to weed out the fraudulent ones. Meanwhile, merchants like Assaf Nehoray are taking their money elsewhere, getting abundant clicks, but no real revenue on Internet advertising campaigns. Newsweek also mentions Google suing a Texas company for placing the AdSense code and then clicking on it in order to run up the revenue. John Battelle says that his friends in the search industry tell him the click fraud is growing and that changes are not too far away."
Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks
Everyone is affected, big or small "publisher".
But I assure you that it hurts when your 100$ Adword budget goes in a puff of probably fraudulents clicks, with nothing you can do about it. The guys at SEO Chat forum are not very happy about this, I assure you.
It's discouraging me of running small-scale Adwords campaigns, honestly.
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What exactly is this click fraud thing? I can't really see how it can be exactly defined. Maybe the owners of the website occasionally want to click on their own adverts because (*shock*) the product is actually relevant to their site, and thus to them. In fact, relevance is supposed to be the whole idea of Google's TextAds, isn't it?
Obviously someone genuinely wanting to click their own ads ten thousand times is rather unlikely, but where do you draw the line? Is this written in a contract anywhere? What about getting other people to click the ads for you?
This seems to be a very fuzzy legal matter. I'm as pro-Google as the next Slashdotter but I can't see how they have a water-tight case here. That said, I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone can correct me.
apterous.org
HA!
:)
"The only advertising that makes you money, is advertising that sells your product. Tricking people into following a link or viewing a page they didn't want to doesn't do anyone any good in the long run."
And in this posters sig:
"Get a FREE MiniMac Here! [freeminimacs.com] "
Scams obviously work as good tricks
So while YES, there is a lot of fraud in this area, be careful about saying everyone running Google Adsense is "bad"
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There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.
If you do follow those basic guidelines, then the ads will bring potential customers by your pages, and some percentage of them will actually purchase your product(s) and/or service(s).
There's no magic to this -- unless you're a fraud right out of the gate anyway.
That's not to say that you can't work the system in such a way as to make it legitimately benefit you. For instance:
Some of my competitors do such a poor job, I decided to put Google ads right on our sales pages so our customers could easily find our competitors. The results they get are so yucky that I consider them to be marketing for us, in a reverse sort of way. There's nothing on our pages that say "go look at how crappy our competitors are, click the ads and then come back" or anything like that... the ads just sit there, advertising software similar to ours... and our sales picked up about 20% over four weeks once we put the ads on. Apparently, our customers are savvy enough to know where they've been -- and how to come back -- when they wander off to look at these other folks. And the funny thing is that we get paid for all this. Now, if our competitors are silly enough to keep advertising a shoddy product, why, I'm simply delighed to host their ads. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
1. Deemed abhorrent by users (giant banner ads, popups)
2. Blocked (all banners)
Frauded (any bid/click model).
There isn't anything these sites can really do about click fraud, this isn't a case of software creating clicks but real humans in a sweatshop. Its impossible to determine if an ad is being delivered to a viable user. Impossible.
For some firms, they will just live with it, but many others will become seriously disillusioned. Ultimately the major sites will have to go to a monthly fee if they want to survive.
The relevance of the advertising also needs to be improved, making them more useful then they currently are. If they 'added more value' to the site for the publisher, then maybe they would be used more, and abused less.
Suggestion:
I am an Adsense publisher for a local community based website.
I would like visitors to see advertising on my site with is relevent to my intended target audience. This could be done by allowing the publisher to add additional keyworks to the Adsence search. (eg. locality name)
Bill Gross's new startup Snap.com has a great new advertising model that solves the click fraud program.
They offer traditonal online advertising options such as charging for the number of times a listing is displayed, and a pay-per-click model (That Gross originally pioneered with Overture).
Snap's big contribution to online advertising is "Pay-Per-Action". They track a user's click-stream from their search engine, to the site, and track a user's movements there. So a bookseller can agree to pay 2% of sales for leads from Snap. Or Friendster could agree to pay $.25 per new subscriber.
This has two big advantages over PPC. It 100% eliminates click fraud. It also eliminates risk to the merchant, there's no more wondering what percentage of PPC visitors will convert to sales.
More on Snap.com at my blog IAmAdamSmith
Our team at online travel startup TripInvite.com plan to start a "Pay per Action" campaign after we launch later this month. Other travel sites signed with Snap are paying about 2 to 3% right now.
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
I've used google adwords for a couple small campaigns. I suspect that I've been a victim of "click fraud" on the content network -- that's where your ads appear on third party websites. However, on the Google search network, the only entity who directly benefits from clicks is Google themselves. I'm pretty comfortable with the traffic I get from the search clicks.
What happens is that price per click drops, number of fradulent clicks increases to make up for it, repeat until such a high percentage of clicks are fradulent that no advertiser will use the service anymore.
In the long view the problem is self-correcting because the parasites will kill their host, but it is not a good solution.
I think you're on to something with the "hit the monkey" model. If you think about it, Google click fraud has a lot in common with crapflooding Slashdot. In both cases, you have a malicious user trying to do something (e.g. post a comment or click on an ad) far more times in a short period of time than any legitimate user ever would. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game. The difference is that with Google ads, the stakes are much higher, and the techniques used (both by the malicious users and the site trying to stop them) are more sophisticated.
An obvious thing to look for is lots of traffic coming from the same IP or subnet. That's why Slashdot has IP bans, makes you wait 2 minutes before posting another comment, etc. Google of course can look for similar patterns. Therefore malicious users need to make their traffic look like it's coming from all over the place instead of just one computer. The GNAA used to crapflood Slashdot by compiling lists of hundreds of open proxies and writing a script to have them post comments all at once (Slashdot no longer allows open proxies to post). We can assume Google filters out ad clicks from anonymous proxies. So now the malicious users need a way to recruit hundreds of computers, preferably from lots of different subnets, and without using open proxies. You can do this by paying people to click ads from their computers, and "hit the monkey" is probably the cheapest known way to do this. If you're making more money on clicks than what you're paying your army of clickers, you'll make a profit.
Now, I suppose you could also write an automated program to do the same thing, but that would be called a "virus" or a "worm," and these things tend to attract a lot of attention from various law enforcement agencies. Better to pay people a couple cents to hit the monkey than go to prison.
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I run a an 80s music website, and I have used the no-archive tags for years.. Yet, if you google up "weasel 80s" (no quotes) my site is the first one returned!
;)
I have AdSense on my page, along with a sneaky PHP script I wrote which grabs my earned AdSense revenue and displays it at the bottom of the skyscraper. And no, I have never paid for my rank.. My site has a 4.0 pagerank last time I checked, and I've never resorted to "optimization" or any of that stuff.. I've just focused on making the dynamic content of my site into good quality content. I think that's what REALLY determines the relevance of a page in the search engines..
--Weasel Who Can Never Remember His Slashdot Login
One of the sites I'm involved with had AdSense for around 9 months and it brought in a reasonable, honest income stream of around $400 per month. Then, without warning, Google removed our publisher status - without giving us reason. They are infuriatingly unwilling to work with us to identify what went wrong; my suspicion is that we were targetted by some kind of competitor who 'over-clicked' and made it look like us - but Google won't tell us anything. IP addresses, times, dates, routes, whatever; just something that could help us understand what went wrong. In fact, their reluctance to talk to us makes me suspicious that Google the publicly traded corporation has turned to the use of underhand tactics to off-load some smaller publishers such as us; we published but did not advertise with Google in return, and I suspect they saw us as ultimately not profitable enough for their corporate greed. I like Google the search engine, but I think we were unfairly treated. If I felt that a court would rule in our favour to allow us access to the details of whatever 'crime' we have been deemed to have committed, I would seriously consider going down that route because: (a) If the undisclosed abuse was internal I could find out who and when, and take some sort of wrist-slapping action. This is doubtful, though; I basically ran the site and was the only one associated with the account and I *know* damn well that I played by the rules. (b) If the undisclosed abuse was external then we could fight our corner for re-instatement and possibly take action against the abuser, and seek back-payments (which were withheld) from Google plus some sort of compensation for their negligence in handling the matter properly. However, all that said and done, I think Google thinks it is above the law and in all probability it is (relative to my small outfit) as it will have immensely deeper pockets. The real shame is that the AdSense programme was working for us, and we were getting relevant ads which our site membership found useful. Google, you have soiled your image and tarnished my impression of you as a trustworthy, decent organisation. At least as far as your AdSense department is concerned. Your bully-boy approach reeks of a lack of ethics and I hope that you might learn something from my case and (I should imagine) the countless other sites who have been tarred unnecessarily and unfairly. I'm sure someone else will come on and sing Google AdSense's praises, but remember my words on the day that Google suddenly stops being your friend and starts to regard you as untrustworthy without giving you details of what they deem as your 'crime'. Mark my words... I post this as myself because I stand beside my words and my certainty that Google f**ked up but isn't decent enough to let us prove it. jtc
The more advertisements I see, the more I come to realise the BBC really is worth the licence fee.
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