Archive for August, 2007

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Google have created a new resource centre for click quality.

Click quality is the Google euphemism for controlling click fraud (okay okay invalid clicks) and although there does not appear to be any new technical resources on the site, the overview makes very interesting reading for anyone interested in how Google’s various layers of click fraud detection work.

The introduction from the site reads:

About the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
The relationship between
Google and AdWords advertisers is built on trust. Advertisers rely on the
relevance of our ad placement, our reporting statistics, and the quality of the
clicks their ads receive. We take this trust seriously, and we know that AdWords
couldn’t exist without it.
In order to stay abreast of your concerns, we
constantly speak with advertisers and keep a close eye on online advertising
journals and blogs. We’ve seen that many of you have questions about click fraud
and the impact it might have on your AdWords accounts. In particular, we’ve
heard your concerns about ‘click farms’ and the quality of clicks received on
the content network. To help address these and related issues, we’ve created
this website to aggregate various resources on click fraud.
We hope that you
find this resource center useful. We’re still working on expanding the website
and are eager to incorporate your feedback. Feel free to pass along
your suggestions on how it could better suit your needs.

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Google’s Click Quality Mission Statement

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

The mission of Google’s click quality team, the group of individuals tasked with developing antidotes for and responding to click fraud have revealed their mission statement.

The mission states:

Protect Google’s advertising network and provide excellent customer service to clients. We do that by:

  • Vigilantly monitoring invalid clicks/impressions and removing its source
  • Reviewing all client requests and responding in a timely manner
  • Developing and improving systems that remove invalid clicks.impressions and properly credit clients for invalid traffic
  • Educating clients and employees on invalid clicks/impressions.

If this commentator could add another item to the mission it would be

“Report transparently to clients on invalid clicks”

Extracted from the Tuzhilin Report.

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Adwords Click Fraud - Reparation

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part three is how to notify Google, attempt to gain reparation and stop the continued abuse of your ads.

Once you have ascertained that you have a suspected click fraud problem, you need to do two things. Notify Google and then exclude the problem IP addresses.

Google have an on-line form to complete. Their invalid click team will then launch an investigation. The form requests details of the campaign, keywords, details of IP addresses and other information which makes the campaign owner suspicious of click fraud.

Once this has been completed Google will then launch their investigation. Here lies the rub. The investigation is not transparent and companies can not be assured that they will obtain a refund. Techniques for increasing your chance of a refund will be discussed in a later posts.

Once domains committing click fraud against your ad campaign have been identified, it is the best practice to exclude them from accessing your site in future.

From the Adwords campaign manager in the tools section there is a tool called IP exclusion tool. Enter the detected IP addresses and your ads will not be shown to the click fraudsters.

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Click Fraud Rises for 4th Consecutive Quarter

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Click Fraud as a percentage of total pay per click activity rose to 15.8% according to invalid click monitoring body Click Fraud Network. This is a rise on click fraud for the 4th consecutive quarter.

According to the report, the key findings for Q2 of 2007 were:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
* The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent. That’s up from 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
* Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 and contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates.
* In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (5.1 percent), China (3.2 percent) and Australia (3 percent).

The Click Fraud Network collects anonimised data via it’s monitoring product Click Forensics. This product works by inserting tracking code into web pages and reporting back to a central server in much the same way as Google Analytics. This service is free to advertisers who have less than 100,000 paid clicks per month, and chargeable for larger users.

Full detail of the report are available on the Click Fraud Network

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Adwords Click Fraud - Detection

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part two is how to detect click fraud.

In short you should suspect click fraud activity if you see a marked increase in clicks but no increase in conversions as a result.

This is a fairly general statement, and needs to be qualified. There may be a legitimate increase in clicks due to the following:

Competitor Activity
Your competition may have stopped running their ads on similar keywords and your campaign and you are picking up their clicks.

Google Network
If your ad has recently been approved to run on the network as a whole over and above search results, you may see an increase in low quality clicks. A second reason for an increase would be if your ad starts running on a high volume site.

Seasonal Changes
If your site sells seasonal products or services, then click through rate will increase at your busy time of the year.

Budget Chnages
If you increase your max cpc or max daily budget then there will be a corresponding increase in traffic. This may not

Ad Relevancy
If you have recently changed your keywords and they have become too general, the corresponding increase in traffic will probably be of low quality and will not generate conversions.

If you can rule out the above items, then it is probably time to accept you have a problem and begin an investigation.

Review your web logs, are your receiving multiple clicks from one IP address. Again this must come with a caveat, certain ISPs mask the real IP addresses of users behind a single address.

Run an account level or campaign level report for invalid clicks and trend this over a few months. Has Google spotted and not charged you for an increasing amount of invalid clicks.

If the answer to the above two areas are yes, then it is time to report this to Google for reparation. This will be covered in the next post.
It should also be added that there are companies supplying a more proactive approach to click fraud detection.

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Click Fraud To-Do List

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

If you are a pay per click campaign manager, then I would like to ask you to one thing today; run an invalid click report from your Adwords account.

As part of their move to be more transparent Google added this additional metric to campaign and account level reports and it is surprising how many people are not taking advantage of this information.

A quick how to:

Login to your Adwords account and go to the report section. Select campaign or account reports, and select the invalid click check box, run your report as normal.

The result was quite a shock to me, for the small period I selected, there were a total of 324 clicks with the invalid clicks result at 24. This means that a little over 7% of my clicks are invalid.

Please note, these are only the invalid clicks that the Google tools pick up, and since Google keeps their click fraud monitoring techniques a secret we do not know what else may slip through the net.

I am interested to get a view of other peoples click fraud percentage, for those of you who run the report, please post your percentages as comments to this post.

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