Google's Click-Fraud Crackdown

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that Google is making some effort to put a crack in the practice of click-fraud. Because of the pernicious abuse of the company's advertising business, it simply can't be sure that anyone is actually looking at the ads. Bruce Schneier talks about the problems of ensuring that people are really people, and Google's solution." From the article: "Google is testing a new advertising model to deal with click fraud: cost-per-action ads. Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever. It's a hard model to make work — Google would become more of a partner in the final sale instead of an indifferent displayer of advertising — but it's the right security response to click fraud: Change the rules of the game so that click fraud doesn't matter."

Comments

Terrible Idea

[dada21]

I'm an AdWords advertiser and click-fraud means zero to me -- in fact, I don't care either way. All AdWords-advertised sites make a better profit from AdWords than one can believe -- it works. If even 10% of the clicks are fraud (I _highly_ doubt it), I don't care -- the profit is still better than most advertising campaigns.

I also get a ton of impressions -- most of my ads have a click through rate of under 5%. Considering that 95% of the unclicked ads still form a brand impression, I'm even more satisfied (free advertising, basically).

AdWords advertisers who complain are just idiots. I've run TV, radio, magazine and newspaper ads for years and never had this kind of ROI.

I'm also an AdSense publisher, and I don't see what people bother with fraud. For the few bucks you make an hour trying to defraud the system, you can do a better job selling something online and using AdWords to drive business to you.

Re:Terrible Idea

[karmatic]

It depends on the term - it's easy to rack up $125/day for the right terms (mesotheliomatic cancer, anyone?). For a lot of people, that's a good chunk of money.

All you need is an internet connection, some proxies, greed, and a "they're rich americans (because they exploit everyone else) so they deserve what they get" mentality.

How do I know this? I'm an adwords advertiser, and I tracked down one of the site owners who was doing a fair amount of fraud on one of my terms. One of the proxies he used had an X-Forwarded-For header, and I found his IP in an IRC log, and finally managed to track him down on IRC. I pretended to be a fellow fraudster, and we compared account screenshots. The guy was very proud that he was making over $4000USD/mo. His sites were simply wikis with stolen content (it's easier to make pages for a specific term that way, I guess). He did the clicks himself, and had a proxy program that simply took from a list of proxies and picked a random one every page load. He actually sat there for several hours a day clicking, and made about $40/hour to do it.

For some advertisers, it is a huge problem, especially when paying $10+ per click.

Re:CPA good for google, but...

[eln]

Driving direct sales is only a small part of what advertising is really for, though. Advertising is also about creating mindshare for your brand. Just because I don't immediately go and buy something from you when I see your ad doesn't mean I won't eventually buy from you as a resuly of seeing that ad. In this case, seeing the ad has convinced me to choose your brand when I am ready to buy, even if I don't buy right when I see the ad. This is effective advertising.

By ignoring this type of advertising, Google is basically giving it away for free. Sure, it's good for advertisers, but I'm not so sure it's good for Google.