PPC Fraud Fighters: Yahoo and Click Forensics Partner Up By Frank Fortunato
April 3, 2008
Wide Ranging Reports, But Agreement for Antidotes
One thing that is certain in regard to the click-fraud issue, is uncertainty: the industry estimates of click fraud (and invalid click activity) covers a wide spectrum, from Google's stance that less than one percent of click fraud on their site is not reimbursed, to Yahoo's two to five percent, up to the 14 percent reported by Fair Isaac, Click Forensics' 16 percent, up to Jon Myers' claim that some of his U.K. clients in specific fields experience up to a 60 percent rate of bogus clicks on their sites.
Despite this, there was consensus among the speakers on several issues, including:
While a small percentage of the fraudulent clicks are generated by businesses to drive up their competitors costs, the vast majority are performed by scammers for profit.
Asia remains a hotbed source of click fraud, with much activity also originating in Russia and Germany, however, according to Jon Myer's findings, the United States was the only location to show an increase over the past year.
While there are varied types of click fraud, the main sources are botnets and parked domains, or made-for-ad sites. The greatest growth area has been in botnets, which are used for spam and data harvesting as well as fraudulent clicks. Cuthbert terms the growth in botnets "explosive," and according to a June, 2007 FBI report, botnets had infiltrated and converted more than 1 million U.S. computers into remotely controlled 'zombies.'
There is also a degree of agreement on prevention, tracking and antidotes to fraudulent and invalid clicks. Jon Myers of MediaVest and Click Forensics offered the following research tips on detecting and eliminating click fraud. They require Web analytical software and considerable time, or, not surprisingly, as Click Forensics suggests, "an expert independent, third-party search engine auditing firm."
Jon Myers said to check the following:
Clicker's IP address.
Time and date of the search, and, of course, the keyword.
The referring Web site. (Ideally should include the full search string from the site in order to check for strange searches.)
Performance: the amount of traffic received from advertising spend, as well as sales and inquiries and cost-per-acquisition of each sale or lead.
Breakdown data as much as possible to AdGroups and keyword levels.
Test, test and test some more before committing a large spend.
Myers also advises e-tailers to watch for:
Find second-tier URLs.
Repeating IP addresses or domains; list competitor IP addresses.
Where visitors are from (out of country or geo-target area?).
Click spikes (same CPC, lots of clicks).
Spend anomalies;(sudden spike in spend?)
Conversion drop-off; (many clicks, few sales).
Drop in keyword performance.
Session lengths, time spent on site.
Large number of impressions, no clicks.
Click Forensics suggests the following:
Prevent low-quality sites from displaying your ads; (some search providers allow for exclusion lists which can be populated with low performing sites).
Monitor who is clicking on your ads and the quality of conversion versus the daily spend (some providers allow for an IP exclusion list).
Geo-target your ads and only display them within the geo-target area.
Track the time of day you are receiving low quality ads and use ad scheduling to reduce fraud and improve conversion.
Find and consider eliminating keywords that attract low quality traffic and fraud to your site. (The problem here is that some of the highest cost keywords, or most successful, attract the most fraud because they make the most money for the fraudsters).
Establish special landing pages after identifying your competitors and blocking their IP addresses and domains.
Click Fraud Oversight in the Future?
Another point of agreement, however tepid, is the need for an industry standard for PPC advertising. It is repeatedly cited how the radio industry has Arbitron, television has Neilson, businesses have accountants, but there are no third-party standards for the multi-billion dollar online advertising industry. While the major paid listing service providers including Google agree in principle on the need for oversight, (Yahoo's Davis suggested the Interactive Advertising Bureau should become involved,) until and unless advertisers' return-on-investment tanks to the point of major buyer resistance, strict industry standards are not likely to be accepted in the near future.
Frank Fortunato is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
Do you have a comment or question about this
article or other e-commerce topics in general?
Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum.
Join the discussion today!
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
