Click Fraud Blog
The Forgotten Victims of Click Fraud
March 3rd, 2008
I spend a lot of time writing about advertisers suffering from click fraud problems, but I think there is a forgotten victim of click fraud; the falsely accused content network publisher.
I read many blog posts from legitimate content network publishers running Adsense or Yahoo publisher network ads who are being banned due to click fraud attacks on their sites by competitors trying to remove them from the blogging niche.
Why Would This Happen?
If you are writing in a very crowded niche, there are only so many blogs and readers to go around. It is only natural that the driven and ambitious members of that niche will stop at nothing to get their share of attention, if their content is not quite up to scratch, it is time to turn to more dubious practices, make blogging in the niche financially inviable by removing a key revenue stream; their Google or Yahoo income.
How will this happen?
Your competitor will repeatedly click on your ads. The click fraud will be picked up by your ad provider and they will consider your account as fraudulent, you will then be banned from showing adsense/YPN ads.
As in all click fraud attacks, the actual clicking will be done via one or more of the following methods:
- Manual clicking - a person sits and repeatedly clicks on ads.
- Click Bots - the competitor will program a click bot to automatically clicks on your ads repeatedly.
- Click Farms - your adversary will employ groups of people to manually click on your ads. As most blogs are small concerns, it is unlikely that click farms will be employed in this brand of click fraud.
What Should You Do?
I think the key to protecting your ad publisher income is to pro-actively monitor your ads, and to report any suspicious activity to your ad provider. If you are seen to report problems, Google or Yahoo will appreciate your transparency (something they never show to advertisers, but that is anther story all together) and you will hopefully be above suspicion.
The clicks will probably be marked as invalid and you will not benefit from that revenue generated, but I think the protection of your account as a long term revenue stream is more important.
What are you looking for?
Unusual click through levels, repeated clicks coming from the same IP address and clicks coming from weird user agents.
This will require analysis of your publisher metrics and access to your web server log files.
How The Heck Do I Do That?
A very good question, you can monitor for unusual click through rates from your Adsense or YPN account. Keep an eye out for unusual spikes in traffic. Unless you have done some pretty amazing blog marketing, your click through rate will be pretty flat, and a sudden increase in clicks is a warning you should take notice of.
With regards to analysing referral information, you will need a bit more technical knowledge, and I will leave this one for my next post on this subject. In preparation for this you may want to review this excellent resource from Aaron Wall’s SEO Book:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml
I am keen to get other blogger’s opinions on this topic, please leave comments on any of the following subjects:
- Can you recommend a plugin which gives you click tracking of your ads?
- Have you been banned and re-instaed, how did you do this?
- Do you suspect niche competitors are clicking on your ads
Ideally I would like to create a series of easy to install and update resources which can help to proactively monitor ads for click fraud
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Tags: publisher click fraud
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March 4th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Hi,
This is a great article. I never though about these forgotten victims. Owill give you a Sphinn for all the forgotten victims.