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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
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
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
But "outdoor advertising" firms make no representations that they can measure these things. You know what you're getting when you buy space on a billboard. AdWords is different because Google sells it with claims that they can track these things (indeed, they bill you based on the results of that tracking). If Google's click tracking is inaccurate, you aren't getting what you thought you were getting. That's the difference.
Read my blog.
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
That objection can be solved if you add the concept of 'noise' to Google's reported numbers, and I'd say most people already do that.. at least to some degree.
I don't think many people expect every adwords click to result in a sale for the advertiser. Instead, people just check to see whether there's a correlation between 'more adwords clicks' and 'more sales'. If 100 adwords clicks produce 30 additional sales, you can say that the adwords are 30% effective. Then it's up to you to decide whether those 30 additional sales are worth the cost of those 100 clicks. If so, you can write 70% of their adwords fee off as a cost of doing business. If not, you can close your adwords account, or lower the amount you're willing to pay per click.
If Google was padding its numbers, people would see lower return rates from their adwords accounts. Those people would then be less willing to pay for the service. They wouldn't expand their accounts to cover other words.
In other words, there's already a feedback mechanism that punishes Google for any loss of efficiency in its adwords program, and rewards Google for providing the best results it can.
"Probably. Besides, why would the user ever pick that last option?" (The last option being to download the ad and the ad's linked page, without displaying either.
If you really don't like ads, or especially a certain type (say, flash-based or pop-up-based ads), then the option to have the link "clicked" and cost the advertiser money without giving them any benefit might be appealing to the users of the ad-blocking software.
Personally, I like text-based meaningful ads like the ones Google provides, but can't stand the intrusive pop-ups, and would like to see a means of discouraging their use. How can following a link to a legal site be illegal?
cheers,
Andrew
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.
But "outdoor advertising" firms make no representations that they can measure these things. You know what you're getting when you buy space on a billboard.
I worked in advertising for over a decade and your statement is totally false. These days EVERY advertising medium being pitched to a client MUST contain all kinds of analytical data backing it up, and this includes billboards. Locations, lighting, traffic patterns, etc, etc.
And I'm sure that some outdoor media companies have their own internal research demonstrating that some locations feature superior demographics (ie, this road is between the corporate HQs and the wealthy suburbs and gets seen by all the wealthy commuters).