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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Meanwhile, two friends of mine had their google accounts cancelled and funds withdrawn because Google accused them of click-fraud.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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My company has about 2MM in sales annually, and we spend almost $500,000 a year on Google Adwords. Over 90% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the GOOG.
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Google does not pay per impression, they pay per click. This is the reason that click fraud is so frustrating. The parents suggestions are perfectly reasonable. Providing the person creating the add and paying google with a means to audit their bill is perfectly reasonable. Does your mobile phone carrier just sent you a bill at the end of the month with minutes used and a dollar amount? They provide you with a list of phone calls made (at least mine does). Having a bill that you can audit against your records gives the bidder peice of mind. There is no ethical argument against it. As is always the case with business...there is of course a business case against it.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
You can't modify the AdSense code to do that, or it invalidates the links. *sigh*
You could, however, setup the AdSense in an IFrame and try to monitor it that way.
"Google does not even allow you to ignore clicks and impressions from your own IP for testing" - Not true!
There is a "debug" parameter you can add to your AdSense snippet which will make ads show up but not make impressions or clicks count. I got this info from Google support when I asked them about exactly this issue.
Simply add the following to your AdSense Javascript parameters: google_adtest="on";
For more info, see http://www.gidnetwork.com/b-5.html (no, this is not my site).
What on earth makes you think IP addresses would be in any way useful?
IP address tells you sweet FA about anything these days. AOL used to run pretty much their entire userbase via a caching web proxy, so every single AOL user showed up with a single IP address. NAT is so widespread now that 2 clicks in a short timespan from the same IP address could mean a user clicking twice on an advert, or it could simply mean two entirely different people that happen to be behind the same caching proxy/NAT router clicking once, or it could be two users who happened to go through a DHCP reconfiguration in between the clicks.
I also find the idea that somehow there needs to be regulation like with TV advertising a bit weird. With pretty much any ad campaign except online advertising you get no reliable statistics at all about its impact. How many people saw it? You can only guess. How much traffic did it drive to your business? You cannot know. Even if traffic goes up after the advert run, it might have been due to other factors (mention in a newspaper, other website etc). No amount of regulation will ever give you the amount of transparency you already get with online advertising in another medium.
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.
I'd complain, but you seem to be doing better with my post than I did.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The parent's comment was just ripped off verbatim from another thread about click fraud. Here's the original.
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