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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Meanwhile, two friends of mine had their google accounts cancelled and funds withdrawn because Google accused them of click-fraud.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!
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.
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.
.... 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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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).
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
The parent's comment was just ripped off verbatim from another thread about click fraud. Here's the original.
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