Archive for December, 2007

My Top 5 Posts of 2007

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Here are my top five posts of 2007 and reasons why. in a dramatic Oscar stylie, they are in reverse order:

5) Publisher Click Fraud - A Definition

I have written a lot of definition pieces for people new to click fraud. This one seems to be getting the most attention, and is usually at the top of my most read post list.

4) For the ClickBot Doubters

People are searching for details on how to program click bots, who says there is no click fraud problem.

3) Sick Blogging A Lister Commits Click Fraud

In the pro blogging community, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net is probably the only A-List celebrity. I was able to gain a response to this tongue in cheek post from the man himself, the ability to add the hooded claw image from Penelope Pitstop was also a welcome bonus.
2) Operation Bot Roast

Not my most popular post, and not much content, but it was the one I enjoyed writing the most because of the last two lines. Sad I know but you need to get your enjoyment where you can,

1) Click Fraud - A Story of Intrigue

In this post I “out” a real incident of click fraud. It is the complete picture of detection, reparation request to refund. I still receive a huge amount of traffic for the site which originated teh publisher click fraud. I am sure the name of the site has been targnished when a search on their site name brings back an expose of the activity.

Lastly, my other favourite thing has been to collect satirical images for post, I hope you got the references.

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What Is The Content Network?

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

I often talk about the problem of publisher click fraud from the content network, I thought it was worthwhile to write a short post explaining exactly what this network is.

The content network is a concept used by Google. The search engine giant syndicate Adword advertisments onto members of their content network through the Adsense programme.

Using adsense third party websites owners can add small pieces of code onto their site, and ads will be displayed. Google spiders the site to see what kind of content the site has and matches ads to this content, thereby having an in-context ad solution.

Google and the website owner then share the ad revenues. It is not know what the proportion of the share is, but it can be assumed that Google take the lion share.

The purpose of the content network is to increase the reach of adword ads. It is estimated that this enables Google to reach 80% of the Internet’s audience (Google’s own figures).

When you create an ad on the Adwords platform by default your ads are not displayed on the content network. You must explicitly opt into this program.

Content network clicks tend to be of a lower quality, meaning that fewer clicks convert into actual sales.

As a parting note, I always advise my clients to analyze their conversion rates from the content network. Do not use scatter gun approach, be selective and target sites you trust. Failure to do so will probably result in publisher click fraud attacks.

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A Year in Click Fraud - 2007 Summary

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Merry Christmas to all the readers of Fraudulent Clicks. It has been about five months since the doors opened here at FC. I would like to spend a little bit of time reflecting on my first year in blogging and the plans I have for 2008.

A look back at 2007

In the first few formative months there has been much fussing with my theme and generally getting to grips with the blogging platform I use here namely Wordpress.

In the beginning this blog started as an experiment to see how people would take to the idea of a click fraud blog. I saw a bit of a niche I could capitalise on. People were writing about click fraud as part of wider PPC blogs or they were blogs tied to click fraud suppliers system and did not offer an independent view of the space.

I started using the free Blogger tool. Whilst it was adequate it did not give me the flexibility I wanted, also there is not the development and support of plugins and tools as there is for the wordpress platform.

I have built a substantial sized archive of posts, and I am ranking quite highly on the search engines for a number of key words. I am very happy with this development.

Whilst everyone else was grumbling about the last page rank update, I was quietly exstatic. Havin sat with a lowly no -page rank for a number of months I jumped to a massive 1.
Was it a success. Yes and no. People are saying good things about my blog, it is opening doors for me, but in a negative way, readership is not as high as I want, people are not engaging in the conversation via comments enough, sometimes it feels like no one is reading.

PremiumNews Theme

I have finally settled on my desired look and feel (or theme) for my site. It is a premium theme called PremiumNews, it was designed and distributed by Adii, the self proclaimed Wordpress Rockstar. This gives me the ability to run my blog like a magazine with news snippets, longer featured items, reviews and case studies (if I ever get any takers - see below).

Case Studies

I was completely underwhelmed by the silence of my request for case studies. I was honestly offering free click fraud case studies to my readers. It obvously came over as some sort of scam. As everyone knows TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). I will try again next year to get readers involved. The reason I am doing the case studies is to develop an archive of different types of click fraud attack to educate this blogs readership. This is not completely altruistic. The more readers, the more attractive I am to my advertising sponsors. That is my motive for case the studies.

LQ Register

I plan to do a lot more work on low quality clicks. Low quality clicks are visits which are highly unlikely to generate conversions. These come from MFAs, Adwords for domains or other sites which are completely legitimate but are working near the edge of syndicated ad rules.

I will be building a register of these low quality sites, and making it available to subscribers of this site so they can prevent their ads from being displayed

The idea is to allow people to add sites which are low quality to the register, these will of course be quality controlled to avoid abuse.

The list will be available for download to add to your ppc accounts and block your ads for being displayed by these type of sites.

I have trepidations at the moment that the list might be too long, but we will see. Please leave comments on this post if you are interested in the LQ register.

Blogging on Click Fraud Network

Towards the end of the year I was asked by Tom Cuthbert of Click Fraud Network (CFA) to develop the blog on their network. This is a big deal to me as there is a huge readership on the CFN but very little content production. I aim to create a steady stream of posts and develop a conversational feel.

What I get from the network is OPT (Other peoples traffic). I hope my exposure on CFN will drive traffic here.

Click Fraud Risk Assessment

I am developing an e-book which will go on sale early next year. It is a practical course on how to perform a risk assessment of your ppc campaigns. It is a DIY version of one part of my consultancy product. It will take the reader through the various types and forms of click fraud, how to assess their campaigns to decide if they are at a low or high risk of click fraud.

The other alternative is to set this up as a subscription on my blog. This would then create a more interactive audience and I can participate in the converstation to bring my expertise to the risk assesments. Please leave a comment on which you think is the best route.

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year

That’s me for this year, finally I would like to say Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year to all my readers.

Neil Matthews

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Baselining - Bouce Rate

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

In a continuing series about base lining, I discuss Bounce Rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric which describes a users activity when they visit your site. If a person clicks though from an ad, or search engine result and immediately leaves your site, without looking at other pages, they have bounced. It is the aim of sites to have as low a bounce rate as possible. This means they are engaging with your content. A highly desirable thing for search engine marketers.

The Google Analytic Bounce Rate

As mentioned in Baselining to Protect Your Campaigns I suggested you should install and begin collecting data using Google analytics. This free tool collects and presents a large number of useful analytics.

The benefit of using Google Analytics is the fact that bounce rate is presented by default on the front page, and no complex analysis of time on site and depth of visit is required.

Why Baseline Bounce Rate

As mention bounce rate is an analysis of a users activity when you visit a site. The profile of a click fraudster is someone who will click through on your ad, and immediately leave.

This is especially true of bot activity and publisher click fraud where the main point is to click on as many ads as possible leave a site as soon as possible.

What to Baseline

You should be aware of your normal bounce rate. Mine is currently in the range of 43%. You should monitor and perhaps plot your bounce rate using analytics. If you see a sharp increase in bounce rate, this should make you ask questions. What have you done? Is there a change to your site? If not, and it is business as usual, you should start investigating your logs files in depth. I will discuss this in much more detail in another post in this series.

Caveat

Bounce rate should be used with other metrics to judge if your campaigns are at risk. The reason people are using click farms is to imitate a real user visiting your sites, clicking through to multiple pages, and perhaps adding a

Previous Posts In This Series

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Click Fraud Network Recruit New Blogger

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Oh yeah, that would be yours truly.

I have been asked by Tom Cuthbert CEO and President of Click Forensics, the company behind the excellent click fraud index and click fraud network to be their resident blogger.

I will be writing about click fraud in a vendor neutral fashion trying to build up the conversation on CFN’s blog.

I will of course still be writing here at Fraudulent Clicks on the wider click fraud scene including news and reviews of click fraud products and companies, something which does not fit into my remit at CFN.

Why not visit their site and consider joining the network. It is 100% free and provides a wealth of resources in the fight against click fraud.

www.clickfraudnetwork.com

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Baselining to Protect Your Campaigns

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Over a number of posts I am going to discuss the topic of baselining and how it can help to protect your campaigns from Click Fraud

What is Baselining

wikipedia describes baselining as

Baselining is a method for analyzing computer network performance. The method is marked by comparing current performance to a historical metric, or “baseline”. For example, if you measured the performance of a network switch over a period of time, you could use that performance figure as a comparative baseline if you made a configuration change to the switch.

I like to think of it as trending your normal traffic levels. In a click fraud context, if your metrics begin to exceed your baseline in any significant way, it is an indication that all is not well.

Metrics Available

Your web server software will collect a large number of metrics about your visitors behaviour. These include the source IP address of the visitor, the type of browser or user agent they are visting from, time of visit, whether cookies are enabled. The list is quite long. For a full list of the metrics available to you, please review your own log files.

What you should baseline to protect against click fraud

I will detail how to baseline the metrics in details in individual posts, but in summary, I like to baseline

  • Bounce Rate
  • Click Through Rate
  • Time on Site
  • Source Country
  • Depth of Visit
  • Conversion Rate

Google Analytics

The next few posts will be fairly interactive, and I will detail how to baseline the various metrics using Google Analytics. This is a free Analytic tool, whilst I think it has it’s flaws as a click fraud detection tool (I will detail this in the last post in this series), it is freely available and very easy to use. If you would like to work through the posts, please have analytics installed and collecting data in preparation.

In the next post I will dicuss bounce rate.

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5 Optimisation Tips to Reduce Click Fraud

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

The following list shows 5 key tips on how a pay per click campaign can be optimised against click fraud and hopefully improve your ROI.

1) Identify your keyword competitors and bar them access to your ads

Reason - competitor click fraud is done by companies bidding on the same keywords as you. If you know who they are, and stop them at source, they cannot attack you.

2) Geo-target your ads to where most of your conversions originate from and avoid the high risk countries.

Reason - Certain countries are more likely to be the source of click farm attacks directly at your ads or through MFA sites. Only display your ads in countries producing an ROI.

3) If the content network only provides low quality clicks with few conversions dump the content network

Reason - A high amount of click fraud comes from the content network, in fact it is the bastion of publisher click fraud.

4) Timezone target your ads

Reason - In the same way you should only display your ads in locations where there are conversions, only display your ads at times when conversions happen. If it is midnight in your time zone it may be business time for the click farm.

5)The higher the price the higher the risk of click fraud. Using standard PPC optimisation techniques spend your money on specific cheaper keywords rather than expensive (and more at risk of publisher click fraud) keywords.

Reason - Publisher click fraud will target more lucrative keywords. Using cheaper alternatives will act as a deterrent. Caveat, I have had click fraud attacks on 1 cent content network ads, so this does not always work.

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Anchor Intelligence Causes a Stir at Techcrunch

Monday, December 10th, 2007

A-List blog Techcrunch has published details about a Palo Alto Click fraud company called Anchor Intelligence.

Their offering is one of the increasing number of tools aimed at the PPC supplier rather than an end user in an effort to stop click fraud at source.

Techcrunch is a blog about Web 2.0 startups and in particular the site discusses venture capital funding.

The story is fairly run of the mill, the thing which makes me comment on it are the comments by the Techcrunch readers. There is some pretty strong language and a large amount of bashing of the click fraud community. What sparked this was (I think) the statement that click fraud was in the high 20%.

Full details can be seen at TechCrunch

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Son of Bot Roast: BotRoast II This Time it’s personal

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

He’s back to avenge the death of his father Bot Roast. All fear his wrath, he is Bot Roast II. Tremble as our heroine is subjected to terrible trials, sigh as our rugged hero swoops in to save her.

B-Movie trailer aside, the FBI have announced that the success of the original Operation Bot Roast, they are launching a second version of the operation to catch illicit Bot Herders who are using loop holes on unprotected machines to launch malicious attacks including.

A more thorough discussion of the new operation has been published on Technology News Daily.

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