Sick Blogging A Lister Commits Click Fraud

Friday, November 30th, 2007

A-List blogging celebrity Darren Rowse, author of the prestigious blog ProBlogger.Net shocked the entire world to it’s core today by committing and writing about click fraud !!!

Doddgy moustached Rowse (87) an Australian (say no more) commited numerous heinous acts of click fraud in an attempt to expose inconsistencies with the adsense programme. So how did he test his hypothesis - yes he clicked on the ads with no intention of giving the advertiser a sale or action. That’s click fraud in my book!!

ONLY JOKING, it just gives me a chance to be a tabloid journalist for a few minutes.

What Mr Rowse (not 87) is doing is highlighting the inconsitencies in the recently announced reduction in the click area. I discussed this in a news items entitled Google Tighten Adsense Ads in an Attempt to Reduce Unintentional Click Fraud.

Darren talks about how the Premier partners in the Adsense programme including Google’s own Gmail, Engadget and About.Com are not subjected to the reduced area and possibly reduced click through create by this change. Full details of his shock expose (there I go again) can be seen at ProBlogger.

On another note if the sites which were ruthlessly attacked by Darren want help to identify the fraudulent clicks, please contact me

Tags: Click Fraud
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

Tell the Invisible Man I Cannot See Him Today!

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

In this post I would like to discuss the lack of visibility Google supplies to it’s customers of incidents of invalid clicks.

Big G are not alone in their lack of visibility , but they are the worst offenders in my opinion.

What is the Problem?

There is no breakdown of where a click comes from, if it is valid, and if the Google filters have marked it as invalid. Google have grudgingly provided some information but definitely not enough.

We know how many click we have had, and which keyword is providing those clicks, but not where they originate from. Here is an example where this may be very important. You have seen a surge in clicks, and if you were able to see that the clicks were coming from a competitors domain name, this would set red lights flashing.

Another recent information release from Google was the invalid click report. This is an account or campaign level report and it shows how many clicks have been marked as invalid but again not where they come from. An example of where referrer information would be invaluable would be to show which domain clicks are coming from if you use the content network. This then gives a site you can exclude from your campaigns.

Phone Bill of Clicks

If you phone provider sent you an invoice for a large amount, you would expect to have an itemised bill with which you could balance your costs against the numbers you rang.

There is no equivalent with your click fraud costs. What I would like to see is the ability to analyse your clicks in the following format:

Keyword, Cost of click, Date and Time, IP details

This would allow analysis and optimisation of your campaign to stop clicks before they result in fraudulent attacks.

Industry Call to Action

I am not alone in the belief that he search engines should be more open with our data. The Click Quality Council are advocating the same message I am highlighting today

Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.

Why All The Secrecy?

Google states technical reasons and confidentiality of their click fraud filters as the reason why they do not supply this information to all of it’s customers. They reckon that the sheer amount of data involved would be too difficult to report to the end user. Google has the data, it must to cross check clicks when people apply for refunds.

I understand that the unscrupulous could attempt to reverse engineer how a filter works and produce attacks which circumvent their protection techniques, but people are doing thsi now with low noise click bots.

Whenever there is a lack of visibility people automatically reach for the conspiracy theory button. “They won’t tell us because their filters are useless” or “They don’t want us to see the real level of the problem because it will hit their bottom line so badly”.

Conclusion

Google needs to regain our trust and come clean about what it and what are not invalid clicks, and provide us a complete list of what we are paying for and who is clicking on our ads.

Tags: Click Fraud
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It’s Click Fraud Class Action Time Again

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

This time it is 2nd tier pay per click company Miva which is making lawyers in the US rub their greasy palms together.

The same company has lead actions for click fraud against a veritable who’s who of pay per click:

• Yahoo ,Overture Services, Inc.
• Time Warner
• America Online
• Netscape Communications Corporation
• Ask Jeeves, Inc
• Go.com
• Google
• Lycos, Inc.
• Looksmart, LTD
• Findwhat.com,

The settlement of the action has not been disclosed.
Full details of the story can be seen at http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com

Tags: Click Fraud
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How to Spot Publisher Click Fraud

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

In a previous post I gave a definition of publisher click fraud. I would like to expand upon this to give details on how to spot publisher click fraud from Google’s Adsense programme.

Capturing the Metrics

Every click from the content network comes complete with some very valuable information which helps catch the fraudster. This is called the referrer information. To get this information you will need access to an analytic package such as ClickTracks or be able to download your raw web server access logs.

When analysing the data, you should look for a string such as the one shown below.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1172774004749&lmt=1188167485&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1172774004398&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_17_07.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo

This may seem to be so much gibberish, but when it is parsed into more manageable chunks it is far easier to read.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads

client=ca-pub-0558200840132548

&dt=1172774004749

&lmt=1188167485

&prev_fmts=468×60_as

&;format=728×90_as

&output=html

&correlator=1172774004398

&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_17_07.htm

&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo

Analyse the Metrics

When we break this down we see the unique publisher ID in the client section e.g ca-pub-0558200840132548 , and further down we can see the URL on which the advert was published. In this case the offending site was www.aminarts.com Please note this is data from a real click fraud attack. Full details of hte incident can be read on Click Fraud- A Story of Intrigue.

So we have the data, we know how to decipher the referrer string. It is now time to try and spot patterns in the data. The first stage is to spot repeated clicks from the same client publisher. This is of course not fraudulent clicks, rather it is the desired action from the content network. We need to correlate this data with repeated clicking from the same source. This is done by capturing the IP address.

The above may seem complicated, but it is relatively easy to do using excel, download your log file and import it into a spreadsheet. I will cover how to do this in a future post, please subscribe via RSS to get updates on future posts. The alternative is to subscribe to a click fraud software solution, these will spot multiple clicks from publishers for your automatically,check the review section of this site for information on the various solutions available.

At this point we have captured repeated clicks from one source address against one publisher, what does an Adwords user do next? Firstly supply the data to Google for a refund, please refer to my article Getting A Refund from Your PPC supplier for details on this. Next I would blocking my ads from thsi site. Consider if this site is giving you any return on your investment, if not, simply exclude the site using hte tools on your adwords account managment page.

campaign managment -> Tools -> Site Exclusion

I also use a belt and braces approach by excluding specific IP addresses from my campaigns to stop ads being displayed to repeate clickers. Again this is done from the tools section of your Adwords management page.

Conclusion

When conducting risk assessment reviews with my clients I ask, what value are you getting from advertising on the content network? Broadcast distribution to all and sundry is often very risky and the clicks are of low quality. If possible ditch these ads or target them more closely. Google now offers site targeting for CPC campaigns. This is where the advertiser can choose a site to display their ads on. It is advisable to choose site you feel you can trust.

Tags: publisher click fraud
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How Click Fraud Software Boosts the Bottom Line

Monday, November 26th, 2007

I have held the opinion for a long time that click fraud software is an investment rather than an overhead. In this post I intend to publish the figures which I believe support my opinion that click fraud solutions boost the bottom line of a pay per click campaign.

Assumptions

My calculations are based on a number of assumptions, these are of course subjective, please feel free to challenge my assumptions and produce your own figures in the comments of this post. I see this post as a discussion on this topic and I am keen to gather feedback on my calculations.

Assumption 1 - click fraud is 16%

There are many, many opinions in the level of click fraud. Pay per click suppliers such as google suggest it is very low (2-3%) whilst some players in teh click fraud monitoring commuinity suggest it is in the upper 30% bracket. I don’t have the resources to do my own analysis of the click fraud problem, but I know a company which does. Click Forensics published the much respected (except by Google that is :-)) Click Fraud Index, which suggests that click fraud is currently running at 16% of all clicks. After analysis of their methods, I am happy to use their numbers.

Assumption 2 - average cost per click USD 0.05

The second assumption I would like to make in my calculations are an average cost per click value. For the purposes of this post, I am being very conservative with my costs and I am stating that avertage cost per click is USD 0.05. It is my experience that the majority of campaigns cost more than 5 cents per click, so assuming this low amount helps to highlight how click fraud can become a very big problem with high value key words.

Assumption 3 - conversion rate of clicks to sales is 5%

To create an income calculation, I need to give a conversion rate of clicks to sales. Again like the cost per click calculation I would rather err on the cautious side and I will set a value of 5%

Assumption 4 - each sale brings USD 10 income.

The fourth and last variable in this post is the average value of an action. This value is entirly dependant on the type of product or service a website sells. I have therefore taken a completely arbitary value of USD 10 as the value of a sale.

The Figures

Our imaginary campaign is reasonably large, it has 50,000 paid clicks per month, below are the sums:

Cost of Clicks

50,000 clicks / month @ 0.05 =usd 2,500

Projected Income from Clicks

( 5% of 50,000 ) * 10 = USD 25,000

Cost of fradulent clicks

16% USD 2,500 = 400

Cost of lost business

16% of 25,000 = USD 4000

Total Potential Losses

4000 + 400 = USD 4,400

Conclusion

These are very large amounts, and when multiplied to very large campaigns, the amounts become very substantial. When considered that the average cost of click fraud for 50k click per month is only USD 50 (source Adwatcher and Who’s Clicking Who) I reiterate my claim that click fraud software is not a cost but an investment in your pay per click marketing campaign. Using this model, it is feasible that a tuned campaign with click fraud software installed for monitoring could make an additional 4k USD per month.

Caveat

The glaring ommission from this model is that pay per click suppliers filter invalid clicks at source and either do not charge for clicks or refund any invalid credits which get past the filters. The problem is, in my opinion, the filters do not catch all click fraud attacks. In support of this statement I set my readers a task. Check the credits on your account, do they look like the figures I am quoting? I doubt it.

Tags: click fraud software
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Adwatcher Click Fraud Software Review

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

In this post I review Adwatcher a Click Fraud software solution produced by MordComm Inc.

I have been using Adwatcher for some time now, and thought a review of their click fraud software may be of interest to readers of this blog.

How it works

Adwatcher like many click fraud offerings is first and foremost an analytic package, but it has a large number of click fraud monitoring functions.

Adwatcher comes in one of two offerings. The first is a hosted solution where all installation and configuration issues are dealt with by the Adwatcher staff. The second offering is a downloadable version which is hosted on a companies own server.

The downloadable version is a PHP and MySQL application which also requires the Zend optimizer, a free optimisation and PHP encryption solution.

Adwatcher works via the redirection method as discussed in Mechanics of Click Fraud Software. Changes are made to your PPC campaigns to redirect all ads to a specific landing page. This page captures the metrics of the click before redirecting to the true target page. For each target page required, a landing page must be created in the Adwatcher console.

Features

As previously mentioned, Adwatcher has many functions over and above click fraud monitoring, but for the purposes of this review, I will only be highlighting the features which are specifically relevant to click fraud detection.

Fraud Settings

Adwatcher enabled you to set your own tolerance for click fraud. The fraud setting specifies the number of clicks in a defined time period which you would like to set as your tolerance for click fraud.

Suspicious Activity Alert

One of the features which differentiates Adwatcher from other click fraud solutions is the suspicious activity alert. If adwatcher detects multiple clicks, a warning error will be displayed (an example is shown below) to the person clicking on your ads. This type of interception of click fraud at source and issuing a deterring warning would be very difficult to do with javascript type click fraud solutions.

WARNING – Suspicious Behaviour Detected

Your internet location has been detected visiting this site more than 5 times over the past 24 hours. Your information and IP address has been logged and sent to the owner of the advertising campaign.

We appreciate your interest and thank you for your visits. However, to protect our customers from higher prices by keeping our advertising costs down, we routinely examine recurrent visitations from their advertising campaigns.

Please help us pass the savings on to you by bookmarking our site for future reference.

E-mail Alerts

Adwatcher has an e-mail alerting function to warn when suspected click fraud has occurred. There is also an SMS function to send text messages to cell phones. NB this only currently works with US carriers.

Generate Refund Request

Probably one of the most powerful functions of the software is the automatic generation of refund requests. At the click of a button, a report is generated showing fraudulent activity which can then be passed onto your PPC supplier as part of a refund or credit request.

Spike Analysis

Spike analysis is an interesting function of Adwatcher. It trends your normal campaign activity and enables analysis of spikes in activity. For example if your normal click rate was 100 clicks per day, running a spike analysis it is very easy to spot anomalies where 2x , 4x up to 10x the normal click activity is happening.

Concerns

Some of the issues I have noted with Adwatcher are shown below:

Activity from Google is classed as click fraud. By default I would recommend adding Google to the list of IPs which can create multiple clicks. The testing tools on your Adwords account appear as click fraud.

I used the hosted version and I was concerned that referrer information would be lost as all clicks would be referred from an adwatcher server. Being a bit obsessive about my stats this was a concern. An investigation of the advanced options showed that there is an option to retain referrer information and pass it through to your other analytic tools.

My final concern is with the hosted version of the software. If for any reason, the hosting servers go down, your campaign clicks will return a 404 file not found error. I must quickly add I have no evidence of this happening, and I trust a company of Mordcomm’s integrity to have the appropriate fault tolerant systems in place.

On-Line Demo

Adwatcher has a demo version of their hosted solution for review. It is useful to check out the features mentioned above. There are also numerous flash training resources.

Pricing

At the time of writing (Nov 2007) the pricing of Adwatcher was based around the number of paid clicks a site receives and if you use the hosted or self hosted version, the prices are taken from Adwatcher’s own site

Free Trial

Adwatcher supply a 30 day free trial demo. This is a fully functional version of the system. I took on a demo of the hosted option before opting for another option and forgot to cancel the credit card authorisation once the demo was up. I contacted the support team and was very quickly reimbursed, something not so quickly forthcoming from some companies offering 30 day free trials.

Conclusion

Adwatcher is one of my favourite click fraud software solutions, it produces huge amounts of top quality evidence to supply to your PPC supplier, in fact I used Adwatcher to capture the click fraud evidence I supplied to Google in the post Click Fraud a story of intrigue.

There will be an effort to retro fit existing campaigns to meet the new requirements, and this could be a large task for companies with big campaigns, but I believe this is true of all click fraud solutions.

If you don’t already have a click fraud software supplier, I highly recommend you try a demo of their solution.

Tags: click fraud software
Posted in Features, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Google Tighten Adsense Ads in an Attempt to Reduce Unintentional Click Fraud

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

Google have announced that clicks on syndicated ads in from their Adsense programme have been tightened up.

In the past any part of the advert was clickable, which contributed to unintentional clicks and as a result very low quality clicks.

Full details can be seen on Techcruch

The new standard required users to click on the title or URL within the ad to generate a click through to the website.

In my opinion, tightening up the content network is a very important tasks for Google, at the moment it is estimated by Click Forensics that 28%+ of clicks from the content network are fraudulent. Targeting the clickable area is a very positive step. This will stop website owners building deceivingly crafted MFA sites with CSS that covers the ads and causes clicks ( a topic for a future more indepth post).

Tags: adsense
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What is a Made For Adsense (MFA) site?

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

UPDATE: Since this post was first published in October 2007, a statement from Click Forensics suggests that 60% of traffic from MFA sites is click fraud.

Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud

Google’s Adsense has created an environment where on-line advertising is a commodity to web site owners. Even tiny blogs can advertise multinational corporation’s products without the need for an ad sales team, or embarrassing questions on how pitiful a sites audience is.

The Adsense programme allows website owners to syndicate adverts from the adwords programme and receive a share in the ad revenue when the ads are clicked upon. The more clicks the more income for the site owner.

In recent years an alarming rise has been seen in the made for Adsense or MFA sites. These sites have zero content, rather they are made up of Adsense ads pointing to other websites. The MFA site owner will create an adwords campaign bidding on a high value keywords, an example of this could be home mortgages. If they create a compelling enough Adwords ad, the Google user will click through to see pages of Adsense ads pointing to other legitimate home mortgage sites.

The MFA sites are often cunningly designed so the Google sponsored links look like valid content links, which the user will unintentionally click on, thus generating income for the site owner.

How do these sites have a profitable model? There is a flaw (in my opinion) in the Google algorithm for ad placement which involves max cost per click x click through rate, so if the MFA has a max CPC of 0.25 and the legitimate sites are bidding on 1.00, if the MFA sites has a high click through it will appear above the 1.00 bidder, and if the Google payout is in excess of 0.25, there is the profit.

Is this click fraud? No these site work within, but near to the edge of the Adsense rules. Should these clicks be marked as invalid? In my opinion yes, the low quality of the clicks caused by the deception of the end users tarnishes Google’s business model which is already stained by the high level of click fraud coming from the content network (the network where Adsense resides).

Tags: made for adsense, MFA
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Publisher Click Fraud - A Definition

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

In a series of articles, I will discuss a particular branch of click fraud known as publisher click fraud.

In previous posts I have discussed competitor click fraud,where companies or individuals competing against you in the PPC rankings click on your ads in an attempt to deplete your daily budget, and hopefully remove your ads from the search engines. Publisher click fraud on the other hand is where webmasters syndicating pay per click ads from suppliers such as Google or Yahoo click on their own ads.

Ad Syndication

Syndication of ads is done by most of the major pay per click suppliers, perhaps the most widely used syndication system is Google’s Adsense program.

Using Adsense, webmasters are able to insert a small piece of code into their websites html and Google will display ads on their behalf. Google spiders or automatically reads the sites to find out it’s subject matter. Adverts are then displayed in context with the content of the website.

If a user of the website clicks on the links, a transaction occurs and the advertiser is charged an agreed amount. Google and the webmaster then take a share of this ad revenue.

The syndication and supply of ads on websites is a very common practice and it helps provide a small additional income to a large number of bloggers (including myself), the problem comes when unscrupulous website owners begin clicking on their own ads in an effort to increase their revenues.

How the fraud occurs

Publisher click fraud can happen in three main fashions:

The first is for the website owner or people he or she knows to repeatedly click on ads displayed on the website. This is probably the most ineffective method as it is widely suggested Google and the other search engines have fgilters in place to capture repeated clicks from the same IP address.

The second method is more technical and it involves the use of clickBots. A clickbot is a computer program controlled by a nefarious individual known as a Bot Herder. The Herder uses vulnerabilities in PC’s to create an army of infected computers which will run a program to click on a particular ad. The low noise level of hundreds (or even thousands) of individual IP addresses means this will probably go undetected by automatic filters
Thousands of clicks will occur, and generate substantial income. I reviewed Google’s analysis of a clickbot known as ClickBot.A, and Google state that attacks of this type can generate six figure incomes.

The last method of publisher click attack is via a click farm. Using this method, a small amount of money if paid to staff in the developing world to click on a link and pause on the target site, click on a few links, even sign up for a newsletter in the hope that the activity will appear to be that of a legitimate user. Each of these clicks on a link generate income, as long as the outgoings to the low paid worker are less than the click value, there is profit to be made.

How Much Fraud Happens

It is my opinion that there is a large amount of publisher click fraud happening, I was the subject of an attack whilst publishing Adwords ad on the content network, and Click Forensics, the publisher of the click fraud index have analysed the problem and suggest the percentage of clicks from the Adsense content network is in the 20s percent.

The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That’s up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.

In the next post in this series, I will discuss How to Spot Publisher Click Fraud

Tags: publisher click fraud
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3FN Marketing Enhances Their Fraud Detection System

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

3FN a second tier pay per click company has boldy announed that it now detects 98% of click fraud attempts through new fraud detection software.

Read the full press release.

It is my opinion that smaller second tier companies need to introduce inovative practices like this to enhance their product and help take market share from the PPC giants.

Tags: click fraud software
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