Archive for October 15th, 2007
The Tell Tale Signs of Click Fraud
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Here is the scenario, your business is running a pay per click campaign and you become suspicious that all is not as it should be. Could you be a victim of click fraud?
Once you think you have a problem it is time to “look under the hood” with your analytic tools.
The first tell tale you will notice is a lower return on investment. In a healthy pay per click campaign, your return on investment will be fairly consistent. ROI is calculated as click through/conversions. If your click through rate increases with no corresponding increase in conversions be suspicious.
Once your suspicions have been increased, another metric to investigate is the bounce rate of your visitors. Bounce rate is the analysis of user activity on your site. If a click through results in a view of the landing page then person leaves without viewing other pages this is a warning, and if you are trending your bounce rate, a sudden increase should set off warning bells.
A companion indicator of bounce rate to monitor is time on site. If users are coming to your site and departing within a few seconds, either your content has changed significantly and is repelling your target audience or something untoward is happening.
The key thing to analyse is the IP address of your visitors. If you are getting repeated clicks from the same address and if that address is located in high risk country such as India, Russia, Indonesia or Ghana then you can confidently say you have been attacked.
What do I do next? The answer is simple refer to my post Getting a click fraud refund from your ppc provider and report your suspicions to your click fraud provider.
Tags: Click Fraud
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What is a Click Farm
Monday, October 15th, 2007
In a guest posting spot on Scam Types dot Com I was given an opportunity to write an article defining what a click farm is.
My thanks to Lee for the chance to write on his blog about internet based fraudulent activity.
Tags: click farm
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