Click Fraud Blog
How to Identify Competitor Click Fraud
October 23rd, 2007
In the second article in our series on competitor click fraud, I go on to detail how to spot competitor click fraud.
In a previous article I documented the tell tale signs of click fraud, this post will expand upon those ideas to help identify specific competitor click fraud.
The first stage is to be aware of your competitors. There is a very simple way to tell who your potential click fraud competitors are:
Type your key words into your search engine of choice and your competitors will be revealed to you, under the sponsored link section. Take some time to note the domain names of your competitors including the companies who are not reaching the first page as they are more likely to engage in dubious practices to get their ads on the first page.
This must come with the caveat that all of your competitors are not advertising all of the time so they may slip through the net, the answer to this is to search for your competitors a number of times, and at different times during the day.
Equipped with this information it is now time to fire up your analytics program. They key piece of data you should be analysing is the domain metric. This will either be the IP address of the person visiting or in the case of a corporate system, a NAT address coming from the domain of the competitor. If you are presented with an IP address use the IP to Domain name lookup tools from www.whois.org to find out who the perp is.
In the next part of our competitor click fraud series, I will discuss what to do if you are the victim of this type of invalid click. Should you go in all guns blazing or are there more subtle tools in your arsenal?
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Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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