Archive for September, 2007

Testing the Google Invalid Click Filters

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

I have been the recipient of a barrage of invalid clicks, what is more I know exactly who has committed this indiscretion; Google.

My click fraud monitoring software has detected a large number of click emanating from an IP address in Mountain View California.

These clicks are over a number of keywords from and via and unknown user agent i.e. it is not a browser and the clicks seemed to display and automated pattern in that they happened very quickly with a very small time on the site.

A quick check of the whois records shows the IP address belongs to one of Google’s servers. I am 100% sure that the the clicks are a system check by the Adwords program and the Google filtering system will mark the clicks as invalid but I intend to submit an invalid click investigation report to Google and ask them to confirm that clicks emanating from inside of the company are not credited to my account as true clicks.

The complete lack of visibility of the filtering process, a necessary evil to protect the integrity of the process from abuse, leaves advertisers in a predicament where the phrase trust me I’m a search engine rings true and we have to assume nothing is getting though the search engine filters.

I already have my headline ready for tabloid publication if it turns out I have paid for these clicks

“Google Gazumps Genuine Growth”

I will report back on the post in a future post.

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Click Fraud - The High Risk Countries

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

It is a well documented fact that certain countries are more likely to produce click fraud, in a previous post I discussed Geo Targeting to reduce click fraud. This post is a list of the high risk countries, where, if possible, you should block from accessing your pay per click campaigns.

  • Eygpt
  • Ghana
  • Indonesia
  • Lebanon
  • Macedonia
  • Morocco
  • Nigeria
  • Pakistan
  • Romania
  • Somalia
  • Ukraine
  • Vietnam
  • India
  • Russia

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Aaron Wall - "Click Fraud is a Huge Issue"

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Acclaimed SEO consultant and author of the best selling e-book SEO Book claims that

“Click fraud is a huge issue”

In his e-book he talks about filtering out sites which are creating low quality click from the Google content network. This is an extremely effective way to block fraudulent clicks by restricting which sites publish your ads by monitoring for IP addresses which repeatedly click but generate no value. A word of caution is that man ISP hide their users behind one IP address, so you may be restricting all of AOL when it is only one user from that network.

His seminal work on SEO which is constantly update as SEO techniques evolve can be downloaded from the authors own website (af) SEOBook.

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Low Quality Clicks As A Means of Passive Demonstration

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

I was musing the other day on whether click fraud or invalid clicks could ever be a good thing. This lead me to the concept of using invalid clicks to demonstrate against evil corporations by effecting their bottom line.

Here is the scenario I envisaged. My evil corporation, lets call them MegaBad Things Corp has invented a new anti ageing cream for sale only to the wives of mega wealthy Oligarchs, the terrible thing is that they make the cream by squashing cute ickle kittens into a gooey mess whilst they are still alive, to make things worse the machine operators laughs (he has to laugh, it is in the corporate squashing manual) and twirls his evil waxed moustache.

I’m outraged, I must take action , here is my plan:

  • I find the keywords MegaBad Things corp are bidding on, in this example it is the name of face cream “From Hag to Fab”
  • I find a large group of like minded people and tell them my plan
  • At a pre-defined hour of action we type in the keyword and click on the paid ad
  • We browse around their site for while, looking at various pages before heading off to the investor relations page
  • We click on the contact us link and send a message in the following format

I am complaining about your kittie squashing actions. I have done this by effecting your bottom line via your pay per click budget. I have clicked on a link without any intention of buying your products. This is eating up your daily budget and reducing sales.

Please stop squashing kitties, I will continue to perform this act until you stop your actions.

  • Net effect, hundreds if not thousands of messages to the investor relation team, PPC daily budget eaten up by low quality clicks with the desired effect of reducing sales.

MegaBad Things is an evil corporation and they are not about to lie down and take this type of cr*p from a bunch of liberal and probably poor cat lovers, so they approach the search engine and demand a refund. Are these click fraudulent? I don’t think they are, they are very low quality to be sure, but the company has invited people to find their website by typing in the particular keywords. Just because they don’t buy “Hag to Fab” does not mean the process is fraud.

It could work, but I am prepared to bet that as soon as MegaBad Things Corp e-mails their analytics showing a trail from a keyword to the investor relation page the search engines will cave and issue a refund. They know who pays the bills.

Keep on fighting the powers brothers and sisters.

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Fair Isaac Click Fraud Study

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I was very fortunate to have a discussion with Joseph Milana from the research department of Fair Isaac on a click fraud study they are currently running.

Fair Isaac is a company which supplies business intelligence product across a wide range of business sectors, the product they are most well know for is Falcon Fraud Manager which protects 20 of the worlds top 25 financial institutions against credit and debit card fraud.

Fair Isaac’s core competency is the analysis of large data sets, the data mining they do gives them the ability to do deep statistical analysis looking for patterns which appear pathological. Using their knowledge and techniques to spot fraud in the credit card arena, the are performing a study into click fraud.

Fair Isaac have issued a call to the broader ppc advertising community to supply data with which they can complete a very detailed analysis of click fraud in an attempt to ascertain if there is a real problem. I have agreed to help them collect this type of data through a call to action of this blogs readership to supply data for their study.

They require the following atomic level data and most saliently, after click information i.e. did the click convert The items marked in bold are required, the others are would like to have:

- Session ID

· Date-time of visit

· URL referrer (particularly relevant for tracking the traffic arising from affiliates)

· Client IP address

· URI Stem (the page accessed)

· User Agent (browser related data used by the client)

· Advertising Campaign (including Publisher)

· Keyword

· Daily spend limit

· Click cost

· Link ranking (i.e., w.r.t. the placement of the ad on whatever page by the Search Engines)

· Conversion Indicator

· Total time of the session

· Total number of pages migrated during the Session.

The output of the study will be a report to the general market place on their click fraud findings along with a private report to each company which participates in the study. It must be stressed that they cannot assist in any reparation of ppc fees.

If the findings are positive that click fraud is a serious issue, it is envisages that Fair Isaac will introduce a click fraud detection product. Their thinking is to place the product at a point where click fraud is detected and advertisers are not billed rather than relying on refunds from the ppc suppliers.

Any data supplied by advertisers will be protected via an NDA (non disclosure agreement) so you can be assured that any data you supply will be treated with the strictest of confidentiality.

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Google’s Invalid Click Detection System Confirmed

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I was very pleased to see that the Google invalid click detection system had intercepted some suspicious activity on my adwords account.

I was running a campaign to drive traffic to this site, in particular to advertise our consultancy services and a number of low quality clicks were captured by my click fraud monitoring software.

I was repeatedly clicked by the same IP address over a period of a few minutes. I took this information and matched it back to my adwords campaign and not only had I not been charged for the clicks, but they had not been registered on my account.

I am very pleased with the outcome, but the lack of visibility of this information is still a concern. Why should I be using third party products to prove Google is catching low quality (or even fraudulent clicks).

I intend to leave the monitoring in place and ensure all future invalid clicks are not registered and to capture evidence on attacks not catered for by the Google algorithm.

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Mobile Click Fraud

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Some commentators in the Blogosphere are suggesting that mobile click fraud will become a problem. In his article A Thorny Issue: Detecting Mobile Search Click-Fraud Chris Silver Smith discusses the fact that PPC on mobile search by providers such as Google is inherently susceptible to click fraud due to:

  • Lack of IP address
  • No Geo-Targeting information
  • No ability to hold cookies in older devices

Chris’s article is excellently written and researched, but I would add one fact to his piece in that click fraud on a large scale via a mobile device is probably not cost effective for the fraudster. It is my experience (in the UK) that WAP based browsing is hugely expensive where the end user pays per KB downloaded. Comments on the cost of WAP browsing or other mobile methods via 3G for example from other countries would be welcomed.

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What is Click Fraud?

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

In short click fraud is the nefarious clicking on pay per click ads in an effort to gain an advantage other than that specified by the Advertiser.

Click fraud comes in two main types, clicks to increase a content publishers revenue and clicks by competitors to impact on a company?s Adwords budget.

Fraudulent clicks to increase a publishers revenue is when a company or individual is using the Adsense program to monetise their web site content. Using this programme, Google display relevant ads on the website and pay the owner when someone clicks on the ads or in the case of cost per impression for a certain number of visits to the site to display an ad.

The fraud occurs when the owner clicks on links displayed on their site to increase the revenue generated. These clicks may be manual or automatic via a ClickBot (discussed later).

Competitor fraud is when companies or individuals click on the ads of companies competing on the same keywords as themselves in an effort to drive up their advertising costs or to exhaust the competitions daily adwords budget so they can then display their own competing messages to sell the same or similar products.

Click-bots are the way that organised click fraud is committed. The bot is a piece of computer code which is programmed to click on a particular ad over and over again automatically.

Should advertisers be afraid of click fraud? Yes they should, it is thought to be one of the main concerns for Google about their future and there are reports of large numbers of hijacked computers which can act as a network of Clickbots launching sustained attacks. These are being employed by organised crime gangs so the report says.

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Click Fraud is catered for by max CPC

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

I read with great interest about one commentators idea that market forces and adjustment to max cpc cancels out click fraud.

In their post the blog talk from computer to cd they state:

The key point is that click fraud is already taken into effect when advertisers select the highest amount they will bid. For instance, there is no difference whether an advertiser pays $0.83/click for 121 clicks with 21 being fraudulent, or $1.00/click for 100 clicks when there is absolutely no fraud. In either case, the advertiser pays $100 and generates a profit of $20, and Overture and/or Google make $100. What changes is the advertiser’s yield (e.g., the percent of clickers who purchased the book) which in turn effects their highest bid price. That is, with fraud, 30 out of 121 clickers (24.8%) purchased the book, and without fraud 30 out of 100 clickers (30%) purchased it. Without fraud, the bid price in an efficient market will rise from $0.83 to $1.00.

In summary, online advertisers must focus on analyzing and improving their internal metrics (e.g., conversions) and not worry about click fraud as it is already incorporated into keyword bid prices. Hopefully, the frivolous lawsuits and refund requests spawned by apparent click fraud will end as those in the industry recognize this undeniable fact.

I am not sure if this model stands up to a sustained distributed attacks from click bots, but I think this is a very interesting concept.

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Combating Click Fraud E-Document

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

I have recently come across an interesting e-document called (AF) Combating Click Fraud. It is written by IncreMental Advantage and has contributions from some of the major players in the click fraud arena.

The publishers review is shown below:

While its origins go back to the late 1990’s, its only over the past few years that “click-fraud” has come to the forefront and become a topic of concern for advertisers, web publishers, and search engines alike. IncreMental Advantage estimates that click fraud cost Internet advertisers close to $ 700 million in 2006. Click fraud has become so pervasive that it has begun to significantly stunt the growth of Internet advertising. Given the global reach of the internet and e-commerce, the issue is not isolated to the United States. And while there are many differing views on the severity of the issue, no one can deny its existence. Among the issues addressed in this report are: • Competitors committing click fraud • Keyword manipulation including jamming, gap surfing, and friendly URLs • Clickbots and click farms • Domain tasting • Click fraud arbitrage • Litigation against click fraudsters • Technological solutions This report features interviews with senior executives of companies offering technological solutions and financial alternatives as a means to combat click fraud. These include:

  • Fair Isaacs Corporation
  • Authenticlick • ClickLab, LLC
  • Think Partnership
  • MordComm, Inc. /AdWatcher
  • ClickDefense Inc.
  • ClickFacts Inc.
  • IonReport, LLC

The e-document is available for download from amazon.

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