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Google Releases Analysis of Click-Fraud Detection
fragmentate writes "This morning Google released information about their analysis of the exaggerated click-fraud numbers. Without pointing fingers, they mention that click-fraud analysis companies need to clean up their methods. From the post, 'A rigorous technical analysis by Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants - flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated.' They even point out some obvious shortcomings of the methods used. The entire report [PDF] is available with their complete analysis."
For the past few years we have had ads running on adsense... 2 weeks ago, we decided we would rather lose the sales that adsense was bringing in than continue to pay google for ads that weren't generating enough revenue.
For comparison, our conversion rates:
Google Search: 3.5%
Google adsense: 0.25%
I don't know what other companies are doing.. but I wouldn't be surprised companies are considering dropping adsense. There is just to much fraud.
Meanwhile, two friends of mine had their google accounts cancelled and funds withdrawn because Google accused them of click-fraud. Of course they had nothing to do with it and when they pleaded their cases to Google they got no reply. Google doesn't have to care because they have so many other willing partners. They were even willing to provide click logs and etc. But they just ignored ignored it. I guess it's cheaper to just cancel accounts who are suspected of click-fraud then actually investigate. But if all it takes is a few malicious users with some scripting knowledge and open proxies to ruin my revenue why should I as a publisher use Google Adsense?
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We have seen some instances of reports showing 1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs - for example, in one case 1,278 clicks were claimed as being "fraudulent" by the consultant while only 850 actually even appeared as clicks in Google's logs.
So how many total clicks did they claim to get including the fraudulent ones? Or are they claming >100% were fake, heh.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
In this case, it sounds like some are crying "click fraud" in order to pay less for the clicks their ads generate. If they can claim large amounts of fraudulent clicks, they pay less to Google.
Sure click fraud exists, but I imagine these "consultants" are advertising themselves as a way to pay Google less, while still having a high volume ad campaign. Taken to the logical extreme, any click-through that doesn't result in a sale was a fraudulent one.
Consultants fudging number for the people paying them? Say it ain't so! Next thing you know you'll be able to hire "expert" witnesses to testify in defense of science fiction over science fact... oh, wait.
Haiku for you!
Or maybe it really is that bad. It depends on how you collect this data thus creating an error margin, and if there is a sufficiently huge volume of fraud, well... the results can look very skewed but be correct nonetheless.
The biggest problem is tracking the click through to the action verifiably. Once a user clicks and ad and goes to WidgetsForSale.Com, the WidgetsForSale folks would need to track their activity and determine whether a sale results (q: within how long?), and report those sales results to Google so they can pay for the ads. That doesn't sound like a very tenable model - it relies on the WidgetsForSale folks tracking data and reporting to Google how much they should pay, rather than Google billing them.
The only way I could see that working is with mandated use of the Google payment system perhaps, so they could generate some link between ad clicks and purchasing activity. That seems a mighty steep hill to climb, however...
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Google Search: 3.5%
Google adsense: 0.25%
This is what kills me. Companies are so willing to fork over a ton of money for cost-per-click (CPC) advertising, when so many sites are not friendly to search engine spiders for organic (non-paid) searches. It's one of the biggest, and most overlooked reasons to use standards-based design practices. And it's free to do so (at least, if it's done the first time)!
In many cases, CPC advertising is another example of throwing money at a problem for a band-aid.
It amazes me anyone would pay any attention to them in the first place.
Google has a great solution for that. If the transaction is online, you can embed a small piece of HTML/Javascript code in your 'thank you for purchasing' page that allows Google to check the value of a cookie they placed on a customer's computer when they clicked an ad.
The cookie links the click to the sale. And there is value to the advertiser as well: Google can then help you track which ad resulted in a sale, and which keywords it was linked to. (So you don't have to buy an expensive but poor-return keyword.)
(I may be mis-describing: Check Google's docs to be sure.)
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It takes a set of balls a mile wide for Google to throw out this report that basically says "If you had access to our secret click data, you'd know how completely wrong you are about clickfraud." "Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have access to our secret click data? Tough shit."
Look- Google could end the entire debate over clickfraud and the clickfraud detecting companies by doing one thing- for every click, tell the advertiser/publisher the IP and time of the click. That's it. That's all. They won't do it in a million years, though, not until government regulation starts to force some kind of auditing- like that which exists in every other advertising media on planet earth. (tv, radio, magazines, newspapers)
Remember how Google just recently admitted that they charged advertisers for two valid clicks whenever they "doubleclicked" on an ad? They kept doing that practice from 2003 until march of 2005. They raked in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits, none of which they are going to return. If Google had been giving out IP and time data back then, independent parties could have spotted what Google was up to immediately and you can be damn sure the practice would have stopped a lot sooner.
Oh BTW- I know Google likes to use the "user privacy" as a reason not to reveal IPs to advertisers. But that excuse falls completely short since both the publishing website AND the advertiser both already should be seeing that IP in their own server logs. The only reason Google refuses to attach IPs to clicks is because it would allow people to see things like the doubleclick scam, or see that their clicks are coming from a country who can't even read the language of their advertisement, etc etc.
Google, stop issuing these stupid public relation stunt "studies" saying how all the clickfraud detection companies are barking up the wrong tree when it is YOUR FAULT for not releasing data that could let people do an accurate job of keeping you in line.
I know it's fun not being accountable to anyone, but Google my friend, you only get to pull that stunt as long as you're a monopoly. Eventually, with increased competition from yahoo and microsoft, you'll actually have to start treating your business partners with some modicum of respect.
If quotas exist, whether set by man or machine, mechanisms will eventually appear to ensure that quotas are met.
If Software X must discover Y amount of fradulent clicks, then there will eventually be a means that makes certain that Y amount of fradulent clicks are discovered.
For Google, how much of the budget depends on discovering X number or Y percent of fraudulent clicks?
For Microsoft, how many pirated copies of Windows must be discovered each day/week/month/whatever?
The hypothesis may apply in other cases. How much of a town's civic budget depends on income from traffic violations? What happens if traffic violations fail to raise that revenue?
Look for quotas. Sometimes the numbers are the answer.
the amount of time their engineers spent disproving their critics, they could have just fixed the problem.
Unfortunately this is not true with pay-per-click, which is where google makes 99% of their income. At the end of a day in reality, you are paying for CLICKS. The question is are those clicks generated by humans, or by scripts, or by people trying to rip you off.
I often hear the same stupid analogy: "Click fraud is no different than getting up to go pee during a commercial break and not watching the commercials, or tivo'ing through them in fast forward."
WRONG. With clickfraud, you can make REAL, ACTUAL, CASH. I defy you to give an example of how someone can make REAL, ACTUAL, CASH by going to the bathroom during a commercial.
Face it- Google will never end the controversy until they have third party auditing. Right now, all they have is "trust us". Guess what- there's no other advertising industry on earth where "trust us" is good enough. They ALL have auditing by independent parties. Cuz guess what? Businesses will try and rip each other off if they know they won't be caught. Google has already proved they are perfectly willing to rip off advertisers since they ADMITTED they have been charging people for "doubleclicks" for YEARS, even though they knew all those clicks were invalid because they came from the same IP/cookie and happened within 1/4 second of each other.
----
At the end of the day, you're paying me for access to my readers' eyeballs. If your product is irrelevant, overpriced or otherwise not useful to my readers, or you lack the marketing skills to gain their interest with your ad, why should I be forced to let you off the hook on paying me? You still ran your ad on my site...
Interesting, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a neutral party do the analysis instead of Google, whose bulk of the revenue comes from those same clicks they analyzed? Having Google do the analysis and reporting is like having Microsoft do Vista benchmarking. That is, if Vista were actually ready.
Simpy
Networks charge advertisers REAL, ACTUAL, CASH for that guy going to the bathroom during the commercial. The ad rates are determined by the size of the audience, so if the audience counts the guys going to the bathroom then the advertiser is being overcharged.
Day job involves webhosting - relatively expensive ads as pay-per-click goes. We dropped adsense a while back, and have had no regrets. Many, many more conversions through search.
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You are still missing the point. The person getting up to take a leak during a commercial cannot make any money for HIMSELF by doing so.
With clickfraud, I can set up a website, have google throw some ads on there for me through the adsense program, and have my friends and botnet click on those ads and make ME cash.
Why can't you see the difference? Am I not typing slowly enough?
.... for taking these "analysts" to task with some facts, and publically. Many companies would have just deferred to presenting it all in a libel lawsuit.
Is click fraud an issue? Certainly.
However, these companies purporting to provide analysis and actually providing nonsense are just as guilty of defrauding the advertisers as the click fraudsters they purport to guard against.
Suppose...
1) the networks had some way of counting the number of TV's on a certain channel.
2) TV's were cheap enough the Joe Scammer could buy 10000 of them and have them all turned on to a particular channel.
Then the rates for those ads would go up (because your ad is hitting more people, right?), and the networks could give some % of the resulting money to Mr. Scammer.
Bam. Click fraud. Or rather, view fraud.
The differences are:
A) 1) and 2) above don't work for TV - they do for the internet.
and to a lesser extent:
B) Going to the bathroom during ads is not commercializing the process.
C) Google is the middleman in the adclicks, so the proper analogy of the networks is the final website. You, the network, can make money and pass money on to Joe, similar to how you the website can make money and pass it on to the click services.
The particular dynamics, mostly A), make it so view fraud isn't possible and wouldn't be economical. That said, I seem to recall that advertisers were wary of Tivo for exactly this reason - it would decrease the efficiency of their ad dollar.
So the reason we don't see the difference is because you're wrong. Sorry.
to advertise my website at http://www.offtopic4.com/ and I'm completely satisfied with the results. I pay 15c per click on the Google Content Network, which I think is fair, and I'm glad Google is taking steps to address the click fraud issue. Hats off to the dedicated engineers at GOOG.
Sorry for the newbie-question, I'm not someone who uses adsense.
Can't this 'fraud' be detected through log analysis (referrers, refearing search phrases, etc)? I would think that you could also configure adsense to link to a specific page (yoursite.com/adsense.php), and monitor it that way.
Am I way off base here?
I seem to remember years ago people talking about how banner ads and pay-per-click just don't work. What happened? Is Adsense really that effective? People I talk to hardly even notice the text ads, much less click on them. No, this isn't one of those "I never click on an ad" rants. I'm really curious here. What has really changed besides a little targetting?
:-)
My gut feeling is that Google is scamming the world. They took a model that was broken, applied some superficial "fixes" to it and got everyone to believe that banner/text ads are "in" again. Meanwhile, they hide all of their logs in the name of privacy so nobody can really tell who is clicking on what. I would not be at all surprised if 'net advertising has become like email is today... 80% fraud and junk. I trust the consultants over the companies (Google) who have an interest in protecting they're primary source of income. But that is just my gut feeling. The facts could be completely different.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Super off-topic much?
"Bad grammer intended"
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center. New strategies for click fraud are probably being discussed right now.
All that evil in one place...
Actually, the convention is now at the after-party hosted at Google.
Because you get a return that you're happy with. Although Google does not have an independent auditor to go over their click data, advertisers still pay. Some feel they are not getting enough conversions for the money they invested in their ppc (pay-per-click) campaign, some feel they do. Some cancel their accounts and move on to a different kind of web marketing, some stay and use the Google system.
In the end, it's a service, not an obligation, and even though most countries already formalized auditing measures for other types of advertising mediums, it doesn't mean it makes sense. Personal responsibility and decision making are applicable in this case just like always. If all of Google's clients demanded auditing, there would be auditing. There's definitely no need for governmental regulation.
End of the day, I don't understand why people pay for a service, with defined rules of use and known risks only to start crying murder later (well, I do understand why they do that, it's just that I don't understand why we are taking them seriously).
If you don't like AdSense or AdWords, close your account. You can. They have a button or something.
that was perhaps the stupidest bit of twisted logic i've ever heard.
I just don't understand it.
For example, check out Download.com. The number two most popular download is somthing for getting rid of advertisements & spyware.
Television, there's tons of service providers pitching things to get rid of advertisements.
The most popular things seem to be applications to share files, freely.
Browsers, popup blockers, has been for years.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that anyone is actually clicking theese ads that really wants what's being sold.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
... and publically [sic]
But it's not really public is it, since google have used their own secret data - unavailable and undisclosed to the public - to do the analysis.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
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...is that Google does not even allow you to ignore clicks and impressions from your own IP for testing. Plus, the AdSense Preview tool sucks - it's too hard to block illegitimate ads / scammer sites from your own listings and it doesn't work for FireFox.
There's a piece of software available from http://www.adlogger.org/ that tracks all the clicks to ads, as well as page impressions, IP addresses. It's fairly comprehensive.
...that nearly nobody will buy a product he only knows from online ads. If I want to buy something specific, I might google for it, which explains why google searches account for more sales. I might look at ads that are related to what I'm looking for. However, if I google for something else, nothing in hell, including Bill Gates, will make me buy a product that is advertised next to my search results. I might still look at it because of curiosity, but that doesn't mean I'd buy it.
For example, I really like cats. I might google "bobcat" because I want images of bobcats. All of the ads that come up next to my search are about all kinds of automobiles - not even only about bobcats. As a German, I'm legally entitled to not knowing that the term bobcat has become synonymous to some of the types of products of a company of the same name. So I'd perhaps click one of those links and find out. However, I live in an appartment. I have no room for a bobcat (of either sort), so I will still not buy one. Another example: I have really fond memories of Taco Bell. I know their home page, but it's not that informative, so I google the term. I get an ad for ebay. Well, certainly I won't buy used burritos from ebay, but every once in a while, I will still click the link to see what prompted ebay to advertise next to searches for Taco Bell. In this case, it's a couple of products that have almost to association with the term. Definitely, they won't make me buy anything on ebay because I was looking for restaurants in the first place, and not for something I could afford to buy. Another one: I google "filers" because I want to decrease the level of chaos on my desk. I get ads for file servers. Being a tech person, I click them even if I don't want to buy file servers.
It seems as if advertisers just have to get their expectations down. They're paying for clicks even though it is the nature of the web that people click links and read the pages they lead to regularily without buying anything. Click fraud? Rather not. If you pay per click, you pay for people reading your page, not for sales. This is just like in print advertising where you pay for people getting the chance to read your flyer. Viewed this way, 0.35% return seem fair because that's an okay result for print advertising, too.
The "search engine optimization" crowd is not evil as such... They're basically adressing the issue that search engines (when not cheated) tend to exclude the smaller or newer sites in favour of the bigger and more popular sites, which actually is a catch-22 thing - to become popular you need to be found, but you will only be found if you're already popular... Search engines should address this issue which is one of the biggest reasons businesses play with cheating those search engines. Remember that ads often are filtered so the only real option is to be listed as a result of the search.
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center.
If there were any justice in the world, the road to the San Jose would be lined right now with large billboards giving misleading instructions, trapping conventioneers in endless loops to nowhere.
Ah, well. A man can dream.
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
I don't see any facts in the Google analysis, just ambiguous terms and a demeaning, "You can't see what we won't show you, so you don't know what you're talking about."
There's been a simple solution to all of this for years and that's to truly open up AdWords to the people that are paying for AdWords; the advertisers.
They won't do that because being open hurts Google and they know it. Google has something to hide.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Now that I know the URL of your web site, let's test out Google's click-fraud analysis. Let me know if they end up charging you the equivalent of the GDP of Mexico at the end of this month based on the scripted clicks I'm about to give you.
Jerk city troll is just that, a troll. This is like the 7th time I've seen this exact post from him regarding adsense stories.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Google is using the same concept to how lawyers bill their clients. Most lawyers ask from an agreed upon amount to be placed into a trust account, and whenever they do something for their client they simply draw down on what is in the account. They charge for everything from sending emails (no kidding!) to pages that were photocopied on your behalf, and on top of this they kick you in the balls with an hourly rate. Google asks for you to put an amount of money into an account allocated for advertising. It is basically a licence for them to print money by drawing down on that account, and use all of that money up. With click fraud being such a major issue, you have no way of knowing how effective your advertising campaign has been. At least lawyers provide an invoice for every email sent or paper photocopied, but as to how important those costs were to resolving your matter is debateable. Google provides some statistics just to make some effort in making you feel better about how quickly your money vaporised in your advertising account. Google's whole online advertising program is a massive scam. It needs more stringent auditing processes in place. Otherwise they will wind up with the same reputation as lawyers.
Much like how your celluar phone company prints out the list of numbers that called you, Google should provide a list of IPs that contacted the website with the search term. I don't see how it's anymore private than if you called a company because you found it in a phonebook and starting asking questions. What type of personal information is Google worried about releasing? For instance, if I search for "outlook plugin" and a company that sells the plugin shows up in the AdSense links on the side, and I click on it - how is that private? Ok, let's take it more extreme so I go and search for "russian girls", then I see Adsense links for that on the right side. I don't see how that is any different than if I called a company and asked for the same thing. Google is just an electronic white/yellow pages. If they just released documents with the request records most of this would be a moot point and people could cross-reference their Apache or IIS logs with Google's click logs.
I got an AdWords account to advertise my Web comic (which I won't name here, to avoid sounding like a whore). Since the comic is free, my idea of a "conversion" is someone coming to my site and looking at several pages instead of leaving immediately. I used keyword ads and got two or three clicks per day and they seemed genuine, but I wanted more clicks, so I allowed Google to show my ad on their "content" network as well, with "accelerated scheduling" to make sure it would use my budget if it could. When the change went through, I got tens of thousands of impressions, and 12 clicks (which used up my budget for that day) in the space of a few minutes. Google's reporting of how many clicks I had gotten from them agreed with my own server logs.
I took a close look at the referrer information on those clicks, and went to visit the pages where my ads had apparently run, to see what kinds of pages Google's robot thought were related to my content. All of them were sleazy search engine bait pages obviously created for the sole purpose of making money by displaying Google ads. The closest thing to a legitimate page among the ones where my ads had apparently appeared, was a page on thefreedictionary.com - a site which evidently exists to mirror Wikipedia and make money by adding advertising. Then I looked at the IP addresses of the people making those 12 clicks. Most of them were from the Middle East. 10 of the 12 were from places where the English language is not in general use. Then I looked at my conversion rate - how many of those IP addresses had visited more than one page on my own site after clicking through? Answer: zero.
My hypothesis: the "AdSense content network" consists almost entirely of bait page operators and click fraud zombies in an incestuous embrace. Google itself doesn't operate either side of that equation, but because they make money from it, they have a strong incentive not to police it. From my point of view, the solution is simple: don't pay for content ads because they are worthless. I haven't observed noticeable amounts of fraud on keyword ads, but I'm convinced that at least 80% and quite possibly 100% of my content ad clicks were fake in the sense of being made by people or robots with no interest in reading my comic. I'm not even too upset about that because I learned it after only losing a dollar or so; that's not much to pay for useful information.
I am more upset by the way Google raises its minimum bid for keyword search ads if you don't get a lot of click-throughs. As a result of that policy, you aren't really paying for clicks: you are paying for impressions. Impressions without clicks cost you money by raising the price you pay when you do get clicks, and that makes the overall system pay per impression in practical terms. Google charged me a $10 signup fee to open an account, which I wouldn't have been willing to pay if I'd known it was pay-per-impression instead of pay-per-click, and I think that is fraud on Google's part.
That may be why I haven't seen click fraud on keyword ads: I don't have even fake clicks on my keyword ads! Despite having no competing bidders, Google has raised the bids on the keywords that are actually relevant to my site to the point where I'm not willing to pay them, so my ads only run on cheap keywords that to a first-order approximation nobody ever searches for, and now it's rare for me to get even one ad click in a day. I could get clicks if I re-enabled content ads, of course, but they'd all be fraudulent. So Google AdWords is basically worthless to me.
How much its revenue does Google derive from advertising? That's the money that needs following.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If you do a search these days you'll end up with these bogus sites that only contain keywords. Some of them even look like mini, useless search sites.
4 &btnG=Search&meta=
Here's an example.
The other day I was trying to do a search on a Dimplex DS5804 electric fireplace stoves.
So I did a search using: Dimplex DS5804
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=dimplex+ds580
(today) I get 105 hits but only the top 4-5 are real site (YMMV)
The rest are these bogus sites, IF they come up at all.
Since Google doesn't pay bogus site owners for this inconvenience, I don't see any advantage for setting up these bogus sites. Do any of you?
Meanwhile, Google looks more and more like a pile of useless info.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
You can make REAL, ACTUAL CASH by going to the bathroom during the commercial so you don't have to go to the bathroom later when you're doing something more important, like.. driving?
Maybe you should ask AOL how that worked out for them.
This is different than AOL. The reason is because I am only talking about searches which drove people to the site. For example, if I type in "poor outlook on life" - there are no adsense links. But, if I type in "poor outlook on life plugin" - an adsense link pops up. Plus, web logs already track what users typed in to reach websites and are listed under "Search Query Terms" in most web log parsing programs. If they are worried about IPs being exposed, then mask the two octets like they did. I am not talking about searches that they did throughout their entire browsing session. For instance, if they searched for "nude Russian girls" and then searched for "outlook plugin", the company would have no idea that they searched for "nude Russian girls" because it has nothing to do with their Outlook plugin.
Additionally, what many people forget is that clicks aren't the only measure of benefit from an ad. A good deal of the value of ads is in branding. Another portion of the value is in credibility. For example, if you search on something in google and a corporate web site comes up close to the top of the hits /and/ a text ad displays for that firm, most web users will think that web site is more trustworthy. Even if they follow the search hit to get to the site, the ad is part of what caused that action.
Think about it this way: If some people make a living out of just crying wolf... guess what they'll do? Cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of wolves to scare their customers with. Tell them that 250% of the North American wolves are in their backyard.
So, yes, basically that's what they claimed in that case: that 150% of the clicks were fraudulent. Literally.
Are you surprised?
All these "click fraud consultants" are people making their money by crying wolf. Unlike any other kind of consultant, they don't even have to fix the problem or anything. (Which, in other kinds of consulting is a clear test of whether the problem is real or bogus. If, say a DB consultant tells you that your querries are too complex, there's a very simple test there: then you write faster ones, please. If the app runs faster afterwards, ok, he was right. If not, well, the problem was bogus.)
but for this flavour it's a job that has actually less reality checks than an astrologer. As long as you say what the hapless customer wants to hear, in the form that he wants to hear it, that's all the "data" you need. And you already know from the start what the customer wants to hear. How convenient is that? You get called by someone who already strongly suspects click fraud (or he wouldn't bother paying a consultant), and has no clue how to check it (ditto.) You only need to do the sacred hocus-pocus and cast the holy runes (or the modern equivalents, involving spreadsheets and powerpoint graphs) and finally tell him "wow, you were right."
Plus, think long term. If you tell someone "well, there's a couple of dubious clicks in there, but nothing that would really tilt the statistics by much", that's the end of that relationship right there and then. If you tell him that your secret voodoo found 150% fraud, he'll call you next week too, to see if it gets better or worse.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It used to be that when I was using Google to search for something generic, I would get a mix of aggregators/link farms and legit sites in the returned results. Usually the legit sites were near the top and had some relevance to what I was looking for, even if I eventually needed to refine the search to find exactly what I was looking for. In cases where I was searching for something specific, like an appliance name and model number, the results were almost all legit sites.
These days, even targeted searches return a high proportion of links to farms. In fact, some search term combinations seem to return ONLY farm links. I know that there's a constant arms race between search engines and SEOs, but at this point it looks like Google is falling behind. This dilution of results is going to be a bigger problem (in my opinion) than the problem of click-fraud. If Google can't fix their search results, they're going to lose ad revenue as people switch to something that returns better results.
While I don't have a "better" solution at the moment (suggestions, anyone?) I'm sure come competitor or up-and-comer will be along to solve the problem.
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My father clicks on all sorts of things. He falls for the "Button" that looks like a windows button. The "speed up my PC" button, which installs spyware and actually makes it slower. He clicks on things that blink. He clicks on EVERYTHING. He opens spam. Bascially, if you're over 60, and use a PC, you're the one doing the clicking.
I spend a few hours a year cleaning his PC and making it usable again. I installed tinyPersonalFirewall a couple of years ago, and that helps with a lot of stuff.
What country are you living in? Neither my phone company in Canada (Telus), nor the cellular company I had the displeasure of working for (AT&T Wireless) ever revealed the incoming call numbers.
(You only get that from toll free numbers)
I thought Google's solution for this was to transition from a click-based revenue model to a transaction-based revenue model. That is, instead of charging per click, they charge per each successful transaction that occurs as a result of the ad's placement. If 0.05% of clicks result in a sale, for example, they would charge 2000 times one click for each successful sale. Of course, if no sales occur, this would result in less revenue for Google; they would have to enforce a floor charge to ensure they make money from every advertisement.
Adsense gives a steady flow of money to micro-publishers. Little companies giving money to little publishers. Finally, publishing in the web is economically viable.
Sure, the announcers get more from their money from search ads. When someone is searching, they are looking for something. If you find an appropriate ad, bingo!, buy it. With adsense, the matching isn't so good. There's no reason to click when you are just leisure browsing.
There's an easy solution here, just change your Apache config to add the HTTP_REFERER to your access_log entries. This will give you all your IP addresses with the HTTP_REFERER, so you can scan for referrals from google.* and find out where those clicks came from.
The parent's comment was just ripped off verbatim from another thread about click fraud. Here's the original.
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Don't. Not unless you can afford establishment advertising.
Honestly. Advertising can work for the very select top tier products that become the establishment product, but in the long haul, there is only one way to make a product successful and profitable: quality.
It doesn't have to be the best, it has to work in the customer's situation. If you sell service, do it happily and as close to perfection as possible.
In all my years of being in business, I have never seen a good return on advertising that turned into a long run of regular customers. Sure, I may have seen some profits, but I also so many losses. I will never advertise again, I can't compete with Target or the like. What brings customers to my various businesses? Word of mouth. It spreads like wildfire when you perform a really good service or sell a great product.
The web is in trouble as programs like AdBlock and the like gain use. I know many of you use AdBlock, but if you use it on a website you like, turn it off. Click the damn ads. How do you think that site is being provided for? I pay as a subscriber to slashdot, and this Christmas I'm planning on giving a dozen or so subscription gifts to people on here that I admire. Sure, Taco and the boys have some nice money now, but I love the site, and I will continue to support it.
Advertising online doesn't work as well as many think it does. I've been watching the companies that have started to use AdSense within their catalogs (offering paid links to their competition). Only the top companies are making it big. I've spoken to some large bloggers (off the record) and their numbers in advertising don't make their blogging a real income. Yeah, there are a few who are making it big.
Google is taking in the most, but they have to find ways to combat against AdBlock and other ways to avoid the advertising. I don't know how they'll do it, but as I find AdBlock being used on more and more systems, I know that Google won't remain the king.
I do believe that sponsorship advertising of the web might work. Basically a monthly payment in order to say "Slashdot, brought to you by Microsoft" or something of the sort. Some podcasts I've listened to are receiving sponsorships, and they are't tacky ads but well thought out slogans or quick product placements.
What? In the US, I have had my cellphone for 5 years (Cingular and Nextel/Sprint). I receive a print-out of all incoming and outgoing calls. They give it to you so you can contest the costs of calls. BellSouth also gives you a printout of long-distance calls for a regular landline. This has been done for years!
I just wanted to shout out a great big “thank you to the people who wrote the following posts which served me as very effective karma whoring material. Keep up the good work, guys!
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To the moderators, I would like to shout out an equally big “fuck you” for your miserable incompetence and neglegence which allowed me to get a bunch of cut-and-pasted comments raised to scores of four and five. You people are as dumb as a bag of hammers in a box of hair.
As for everyone else, Slashdot sucks. Do something about it.
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Another very obvious source of mistakes by someone trying to audit from using only logs is BOOKMARKS... if a visitor bookmarks the landing page, and the adwords client is using tracking URLs (and anyone with a clue is), then the tracking URL is saved in the bookmark. When the visitor uses the bookmark again to revisit the site a minute, a day or months later, it "looks" like another Adword click. The only difference will be that the referring URL is blank (bookmarked requests do not send a referring URI).
My web site has extensive metrics and fraud detection built into it (all custom work), and this is a subject I know a *lot* about. I was a significant advertiser from the beginning of Adwords up until early 2005, and remain an Adwords publisher.
As of when I stopped using CPC ads (about 18 months ago), the only CPC middlemen with believable click streams were Google and Overture/Yahoo. I found Google's to be slightly higher quality than Overture, but roughly comparable.
People who specifically did a Google Search on the Google search engine page and then clicked an AdSense ad (or a natural search result) do consistently have higher conversion rates than those who clicked through from 3rd party Adsense Advertisers - that's a fact, and is never going to change and it is NOT evidence of fraud.
The former types of clicks are from highly-motivated searchers, while the latter are just curious because they happened to see an ad on a web site related to your search terms. That's not fraud... it's just understanding the limitations of third party ads and managing your bids appropriately, which takes work and careful analysis of your results.
If you come away from this with one idea in your head - it needs to be - before you cry "fraud", compare the totals from your own reports against the totals that Google (or any CPC source) says they *CHARGED* you for. If google says that on Tuesday, you were charged for 100 clicks, and your "Auditor" says that on Tuesday you had 300 Google Clicks, and 185 of them were "fraud", the problem lies with your auditor, not with Google. [Keep in mind what timezone your web server is in also when trying to understand when "Tuesday" was]
Also don't overlook that the performance of your web site may be part of the problem. All that Google can reliably measure is that they sent a visitor your way - not that they actually arrived and your page loaded. If your firewall blocks certain IP addresses or your landing page loads so slowly that the visitor thinks your server is dead, then you paid for a click that is worthless - not because of what Google did or didn't do, but because the visitor never saw your message. Remember that some of your visitors are still on dialup - have you recently looked to see how many seconds it takes to load your web page on dialup?
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0