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.

Comments

real link to report

[Anonymous Coward]

this is the correct link, the other one is just legal blahblah:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Report .pdf

Re:real link to report

[DeadSea]

For anyone interested in reading the findings without having to wade through it all, then go to page 36 and start with section 9.3 where a little further on it also refers to account terminations and how this occurs, section 9.6 is the bit that I guess most may be interested in...you never know, you may then decide to read it all

- OptiRex

Statistics about click fraud shown to Adwords user

[DeadSea]

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

Re:Enron

[Zaphod2016]

How is Google diferent that the big "E"?

Branding. For example, Google's famous motto is: "don't be evil". If memory serves, Enron's less-famous motto was: "Ken Lay needs a new boat".

From the objections_response

[mustafap]

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.

Re:Billboards

[jalefkowit]

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.

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.

do not think much of click fraud detection system

[dino_russ]

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

Re:Statistics about click fraud shown to Adwords u

[Jonah Hex]

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