Click Fraud Blog
Tell the Invisible Man I Cannot See Him Today!
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.
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Tags: Click Fraud
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