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How Google Manages Click Fraud
Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.
this is the correct link, the other one is just legal blahblah:
t .pdf
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Repor
Google is (as of yesterday) now showing statistics about how many invalid clicks an adwords account has recieved. You can read all about it in the adwords blog
If ad-sense is its major source of money, and it keeps the underlying numbers pretty well buried, could we be looking at another Enron? Imagine it comes out that 90% of all clicks are fraudulent. How many advertizers leave? How badlu does the stock drop? This is one of the things that makes me nervous about Google as an investment. Remember, Enron was loved by Wall Street too. Enron did not produce anything physical either. Enron reported great numbers. Underlying numbers were hidden away.
How is Google diferent that the big "E"?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Rather it is the answer to the judge and mentions (2 or 3 times, shortly) the report of the expert. All the meat that is to be found in the PDF is that the report is conclusive that Google does all it can reasonably to combat click fraud.
The PDF is interesting only if you're interested in legal stuff...
My 0.02
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Report .pdf This actually has a lot more meat and information since this is the actual report.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
If you don't have time to read the full 47 page report, Search Engine Watch has summarized some of the most interesting findings.
404 - File Not Found
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
For a company that has a guiding creed of "Don't do evil", I wonder why I keep smelling traces of sulphur when their name comes up. Not all evil involves point-blank fraud, or requires a malicious nature.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
Nice quote:
"The California attorneys take the position that the damages are 200 times $90 million, or 18 billion, which is more revenuse than google has received in its entire existance"
You just have to hand it to lawyers, they'll try anything.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Instead of throwing chairs or tantrums, lecturing about security etc...
As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods , policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin, a Professor of Information Systems at NYU is now available....
Microsoft ought to have some independent experts studying their source code, and reporting whether the products are actually designed propoerly / elegantly / optimally / for best performance / buggily. Simply dishing out Service Packs and Lip Service cannot work for very long.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Any second now. Aaaaaaany second now...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
there simply has to be a time in google's future when they will stop throwing money at flashy rounded-corners web2.x apps, and try squeasing money out of their plethora of experiments.
In regards to gmail, besides leading the way with "new approach blahblah", and many innovations like coloured conversations and advanced search options, what is the real business model behind it? Don't tell me that the adsense box on the right gets any click.
cut this signatures madness. stop reading them now!
Advertisers will pay for a billboard without any guarantee from the advertising company about how many people will drive past the sign, how many of those will read it, how many will take the information in and act on it. The client is assumed to be taking a risk in that regard.
Over time people decide for themselves whether a particular type of advertising is working for them. If the business keeps coming in why should there be a need for this type of analysis?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
a lot of the click frauds comes for the irc
you can get things by clicking ads and search.
I'm writing a piece of ad-blocking software myself, and I was actually thinking of incorporating a few features. Specifically, the option of whether not to download the advert at all; to download the advert without displaying it; or to download the advert without displaying it and download the linked page without displaying it. Is this last option an example of "click fraud"?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
where is my money for being tricked into clicking on ads? I want $0.05 deposited into my account everytime I see a "Search for on EBAY!". Kramer, Jackie Chiles, and I will be in your office in the morning to sign the paperwork.
interestingly, enron came up with those huge commercial sized wind power generators. At the firesale, GE bought that division and those are some of the ones going in all over for commercial electrical generation.
e n/index.htm
Here is what they have now
http://www.gepower.com/businesses/ge_wind_energy/
So this is why I am asked to approve their new terms and conditions?
It is interesting to see Google asked someone from the academic
community to do this study.
The most the study says is that the algorithms the Google
uses are good to detect click fraud. It does not give any clue on
how much fraud is not detected by the algorithms.
Just a comment on their detection process. As a publisher who was terminated (and appeal denied) I do not believe in their process. I have a very active dinosaur website (approaches 1 million hits per month in school year -- probably lots of kids/teachers). it went well for one year then without notice (must be their autormated removal process) I was terminated for me or someother person associated with me generating what they classified as invalid clicks. Well I can state clearly i did not generate one invalid click, and I am only person doing website. So some other process was generating invalid clicks in their checking process. I am not sure what, whether with lots of activity I was getting those repeat 2 clicks that they filter out as invalid? Was there some spider clicking these (a competitor as I have heard about). All I maintain as a publisher I was terminated for nothing I did but was unfaily accused of doing invalid things. Does not make me very favorable to Google and their monolithic, unfair giant system. And I am happy to tell any one who asks what I think of their crummy system!!! Russ Jacobson Illinois State Geological Survey Champaign, IL
The last link is actually very good, and an easy read. Surprising for a legal document. It is "Googles Omnibus Response to Objections". I suggest giving it a read (PDF) http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/objections_resp onse.pdf
It is basically a response to the objections of a grand total of 51 people in "the class". An incredibly small number of objections.
From the document:
"The assertion that Google has done nothing wrong was echoed by advertisers that opted out of the settlement."
"Unlike Retailers, Pay per click advertisers can limit the money risked for each click and for each day...Businesses should treat pay-per-click advertising like any other advertising...If it's costing more to advertise than your resulting profit, STOP ADVERTISING."
And, regarding the "click fraud detection", there is only a small portion of this document that mentions the review process by Dr. Tuzhilin. It does mention that the click fraud detection methods by Google were confirmed to be reasonable.
And finally, it was interesting to see read the jabs taken at the lawyers who brought the class action lawsuit to begin with...and the copy-cat cases from California, obviously a bunch of ambulance chasers.
Now this seems like a damn stupid idea to me. Say I'm trying to discover methods to click fraud my competitors or perhaps come up with automated software to sell. I can now use a dummy account with Google using search terms no one would hit and test different methods of fraud while getting feedback on which methods trip their detection.
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
While it's true that revealing too many information is an information security problem, they are in a position that most advertisers believe that Google AdWords has more invalid clicks than other competitors. They have to prove (or at least, show) something to keep customers.
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
It sounds like you got a truly horrible treatment. An intersting question is whether the adword business model works at all given that fraudulent clicks can be generated for two opposite purposes and there does not seem to be a fair system to separate them: 1. Increasing website revenue, 2. Kill competitor - very efficient since there are few other advertising alternatives out there for small publishers.
Simple solution... Delay the data by a random time. At one attempt per minute you could find 'working' fraud methods pretty easily, but if you had to wait 4 days between each attempt then it becomes infeasible.
I see "Slurp" (Inktomi bot) in my weblogs hitting the google ad. Then I see clicks per
day and I get charged. I have not seen in the report where it filters out something as
stupid as a bot from another company. I do see no "googlebot" clicks in the weblogs,
but other bots go right through.
http://wwww.p2pnet.net/ is a website deicated to filesharing news. The owner of the website, Jon Newton, runs the website and barely breaks even. He subscibed to Google's adsense in order to generate some revenue. When a story about a filesharing lawsuit broke in the lamescream news, an article in p2pnet was referenced. This article generate a huge number of visits and therefore a much larger than usual number of adsense clicks. Rather than pay what was owed to Jon, Google accused Jon of click fraud and even showed information implying his guilt. Google continues to ignore Jon's request for information relating to this accusation and refuses to communicate with him to clear things up.
You can read about it at http://www.p2pnet.net/story/9086 . This has happened not only to Jon Newton but also to many other small website owners. I am a Geek who used to love using Google, but now that Google has become big, it is doing what most other big companies do - screw the small guy and just walk away. Needless to say, I use alternative search engines instead.
I conclude that Googles efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable.
Maybe should have been in the summary. The document is also fascinating account of how they go about it however.
I just started reading section 4, and ran across this:
"Computing devises attached to the Internet"
Spell check anyone?
And this sentence is just hillarious:
"Internet was developed long time ago."
While that possibility did occur to me, there is also these issues:
Giving the customer recent data, preferably not more than 48 hours old. Most people will expect near real time statistics from Google on this one.
Using multiple accounts to test many methods, thus allowing many attacks to be checked while making any delay between attack/statistics less of an issue.
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
While I understand that the customers want info about invalid clicks, in this case I think they are shooting themselves in the foot. Security through secrecy has always been a hot topic, but in some cases it definitely has an advantage. Customers will not be pleased if click fraud increases as a result of this, and Google will possibly have to move faster and with more resources to shore up their fraud detection (not too bad for customers but could be bad for Google with the bad PR, etc).
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Is an exceptionally poor writer.
"...NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU)..."
----------
Redundancy Police,
Department of Redundancy Department
From WSJ "Lawsuits Fly Over Google Founders' Big Private Plane"
Mr. Jennings says Messrs. Brin and Page "had some strange requests," including hammocks hung from the ceiling of the plane. At one point he witnessed a dispute between them over whether Mr. Brin should have a "California king" size bed, he says. Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt stepped in to resolve that by saying, "Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let's move on."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11522278853 6400097-i72SXBBTMX_EPvtfDIn9uNjtiss_20070707.html
Same thing happened to me. 6 months with google and no problems. Then comes the email out of the blue telling me my account has been terminated for invalid clicks. My appeal was met with a form letter reply telling me that *I* was not trustworthy because of false clicking. I run a rolling newsblog that only had one google panel. I assured them that I had better things to do with my time than to click on their links. End result, I removed the google code from my site. Their appeal process SUCKS. They provide ZERO assistance to the site owner. And it's quite easy for ANYONE on the internet to maliciously impact a google adsense account on any site they desire.
Latest post aside, even if advertisers don't get driver data etc... they still expect the ad to be on the billboard. Billboard companies charge by space with an adjustment for the quality of the space. If they misrepresent the space, i.e. you buy 50 spaces and get 10 that is simple fraud.
Google charging by clicks - if they misrepresent clicks I don't see how it is any different.
No. If you're committing click fraud on your own account, you already know how many clicks you're causing and how many are reported in your AdWords report (fraudulent clicks are already excluded), so the "fraudulent clicks" column doesn't give you any additional information.
techniques... I know what they're doing for ad sense. They look for anomolies. You have a campaign c(1) running on sites s(1)...s(n). You are site s(j) where 1=j=n. if the ctr for c(1) across all sites s(1)...s(n) deviates by a certain amount compared to the ctr of c(1) on your site s(j), you are out of there. You can improve this by evaluating more campaigns per site. They also do this in reverse, or if they don't, they should. It's simple but effective. When you complicate it like this paper suggests it will get worse IMO. In fact I think that google makes it more complicated than what I have described hence their problem. The only way around this anti-fraud technique is to inflate impressions to keep CTR reasonable. But you can crack impression inflation since it requires a huge number of impressions thus more opportunities to detect fraud (wow, 10% of the impressions are from the same IP / cookied user).
Looks like I gave out the secret sauce.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
An entire study on clicks (fraudulent/invalid whatever) and no mention of botnets? A mildly sophisticated botnet can present clicks that are indistinguishable from real end users.
Like the fellow in the bank who moved 1 penny from all credits into his account there is money to be made here. Just dont make too much money to get the attention of the authorities.
- Couldnt-be-bothered-to-create-an-account
Either that, or I need to catch up on my knowledge of the Internet.
He claims that "Computing devises attached to the Internet can exchange data of various types..."
Computing devises???
I am sorry, I just had to comment on this. It is not every day that Computer Science professors misspell devices :)
I've heard about similar cases, and I think it sucks. That's why the lawsuit against Google bothers me so much. If their current fraud-detection process does not catch "enough" fraud, imagine how ridiculously strict it will have to become to accomplish such a difficult feat.
I've wondered what would happen if I used Ad-words on my blog and a person in my family happened to click on an interesting ad. Given it's a low-volume blog I'm sure that Google would be able to correlate the IP addresses, so I imagine such a thing would result in the quick cancellation of my ad-words account. That's part of the reason I don't use ad-words on my blog.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I too have experienced first hand the process of being terminated from google as a result of invalid page clicks. Any attempt to gain an explanation as to how the invalid clicks occured is met with standard form letters telling you that you can appeal but Google reserves the right to terminate anyone at anytime. It is really quite stupid as you have the option of appealing, but unless you know why you have been banned, as in where the clicks have occured, you have no hope of explaining any invalid clicks. Interesting to note that Google provides facility for you to control the ads that display on your site, but unless you are aloud to click on the ads it is very difficult to view the ads as clicking on them would no doubt cause invalid page clicks.
From the article: "Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google's efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable."
Gentlemen:
When it comes Truly validating Paid Clicks from any search engine, there are some critical points that you are missing and need to pay attention to.
This form of advertising is in its infancy and as we progress to an industry standard of Validating this space please remember the following:
1. Do you really think that it is in Google's Best Interest or in the Business plan to actively seek out invalid clicks or click fraud?
2. Every other advertising form in the Media has a 3rd party Validator, Checking the data on behalf of the advertiser. Television has Nielsen, Radio has Arbitron, etc. Even Accounting has SOX. Presently, only the Search Engine is the final arbitrator of credits or refunds. The industry needs to progress to this model eventually to give PPC advertisers peace of mind.
3. The search engine can only see click information up to the point where the ad is clicked- there are other attributes once the click goes into your sight (behavior wise) that the search engine cannot see but the Advertiser has data for. This gap needs to be reconciled by both parties.
Another alternative if this is not reasonable is to continue to let the bank balance your checkbook without checking it yourself.