Archive for October, 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.

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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.

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Click Fraud - The High Risk Countries

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I previous posts I have discussed Geo-Targeting to avoid click post, in this article, I list the high risk coutries where a large majority of clicks fraud attempts originate from.

It makes good pay per click ROI as well as click fraud avoidance sense to restrict access to these counties if you do no sell to cistomers in these regions.

The high risk countries are:

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

If you feel any countries have been missed please leave a comment with details.

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Click Fraud Is Solved !!! (well maybe)

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Bromba GMbh have made an advancement in biometric security which may stop click fraud forever!!!

The new development is a biometric reader on a mouse.

Here is my theory on how click fraud will be wiped from the face of the earth.

  • User clicks on an Awords ad
  • The mouse send your personal biometric data to Google (probably in the clear knowing Google).
  • Google’s evil database of all our personal information is interrogated and matched to your record
  • Your demographics, credit score, passed purchasing history and suitability for the product are all measured, and then and only then are you passed through to the landing page of the target company

Big brother is not just watching, he is sitting waiting to analyse all your clickety clicks.

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How To Create an Invalid Clicks Report - Video Guide

Monday, October 8th, 2007

In a previous post Click Fraud To Do List I discussed how overlooked, but very important the invalid click reporting function is. In this multi media vPost I show how to generate an invalid click report.

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A Definition of Cost Per Action Advertising

Monday, October 8th, 2007

Cost per action (CPA) is an internet marketing method whereby the advertisers is only charged when an action of their choosing happens after an end user clicks on their ad.

In traditional pay per click or pay per impression advertising, the advertiser pays regardless of whether the desired action on their site occurs.

The action can be a sale via an e-commerce enabled website, an e-mail sign up for a newsletter or the completion of an on line survey, in fact the action can be whatever outcome the advertiser desires.

The action is matched back to the original click via an event driven script. An example of this could be a script which contacts Google with a click ID number once an end user has completed a shopping cart check out and the credit card authorisation is done. This is usually know as the thank you page.

Because the advertiser has much more control in the outcome, they are more inclined to pay a premium for this type of advertising. If they know they will make $100 through the download and sale of a software title, they will be happy to pay a 20% commission because they know their end goal has been met.

In a wider click fraud context, CPA creates an environment where fraudulent clicks are far less likely to occur. Automated credit card payments are more difficult to process via click bots or on click farms, but the larger revenues to be gain will soon enticed technically proficient teams of organised fraudsters to enter this arena.

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Who’s Clicking Who Please Don’t Sue

Monday, October 1st, 2007

In noticed the following disclaimer on click fraud software supplier Who’s Clicking Who website. I wonder if they had a visit from a certain search engines attorney?

WhosClickingWho?™ Independent Auditing Service is a tool developed solely to help identify abusers fraudulently clicking on Pay-per-click listings, and in no way implies any abuses by the Pay-per-click Search Engines themselves. We believe legitimate Pay-per-click Service companies are also as keenly interested in preventing fraudulent click activity as their customers are. PPC Audit Inc. makes no assertions as to what constitutes fraudulent click activity. Such determinations are to be made between the PPC search engine user and PPC search engine provider, based on the user’s data provided.

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