Archive for June, 2008
Click Fraud and The Presedential Race
Monday, June 30th, 2008
I am seeing a lot of chatter on the net about how click fraud may be used as a tool in the upcoming presedential campaign.
Internet marketing techniques will play a big part in the upcoming campaign, and the ability to deplete a candidate’s ad budget is being seen as a way to support your own candidate.
I have seen a number of Facebook groups advocating this approach, and the following story fell into my RSS reader today:
http://www.dailykos.com/stornly/2008/6/23/18554/9671 (update 2008-10-17: this page no longer seems to be available)
NOTE: As a UK citizen I don’t have a say in this contest, both sides are attacking each other, I have no biase one way or the other.
Tags: political click fraud
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
Survey Results In
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
I recently ran a survey on this site to see what type of articles you would like me to write.
The overwhelming result was that you would like to read how-to articles. With this in mind I have decided to create a lot more detailed articles on protecting your advertising spend from click fraud.
In a 15 part series called How To Stop Click Fraud , I will take readers through the many levels required to correctly protect you ad spend from click fraud. There is no one solution fits all, this series will look at:
- Introduction to click fraud
- Competitor Click Fraud
- Publisher Click Fraud
- Click Bots
- Click Farms
- Detecting Click Fraud
- Analytics
- Click Fraud Software
- Exclusion Lists
- What the search engines are doing.
- Getting A Refund
- Introduction to Low Quality Clicks
- Made for Ad Sites
- Parked Domains
- Geo-Targeting
I will of course still be keeping you up to date on click fraud industry news and analysis type articles on developments in the arena.
Why not check out my subscription options to ensure you receive all of the articles as they are published.
Tags: survey
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
Entrecard Bans ClickBots/DropBots
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
A number of months ago, I wrote an article about gaming Entrecard and asked if it was a type of click fraud.
The crux of this post was that people were creating click bots or drop bots to drop a virtual business card on other peoples blogs in exchange for credits, these credits could then be exchanged for advertising or even sold for hard cash.
I recently received an e-mail from the Entrecard team which backs up what I was thinking about at the time, it is now against the programs code of conduct to run these click bots.
It takes no leap of imagination to see that if people can make money easily by dropping virtual business cards then someone will write some code to “game” this procedure.
I’m resisting the temptation to say I told you so, but I guess Entrecard are feeling the pain due to lower quality clicks from their program. At the time they said these activities were okay.
The body of the email is shown below:
Greetings,
This message is to inform you that effective July 1, 2008, Entrecard will be purging from its system the accounts of all members currently operating “Quick Drop Pages”. We have assembled a massive list of all quick drop pages, and starting on the above mentioned date, we are going to go through the entire list and close the accounts of all the owners.
To avoid having your account with Entrecard permanently removed, you must take down your quick drop page before July 1. If we open a quick drop page with your widget on it, your account will be removed from Entrecard without warning.
What is a Quick Drop Page?
Here is an example:
http://entrecard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/screenhunter_02-jun-26-1736.gif
Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget. If you have a quick drop page, you must take it down immediately.Why are Quick Drop Pages bad?
Quick drop pages devalue our network as a whole, by motivating members to drop on the same, quick loading pages, en masse to gain credits quickly and efficiently. Their traffic is going to these quick drop pages instead of being dispersed among quality blogs. It goes against the spirit of Entrecard, and is essentially a scheme to gain credits quickly.How will you find them?
Luckily for us, people running “quick drop”, or “powerdrop” pages have listed themselves all over the internet, and we’ve amassed a list that we believe includes every power drop page in existence. Additionally, members dropping on “quick drop pages” may start receiving stiff credit penalties for every drop they do on quick drop pages, as it is not a visit to a blog and thus an illegal drop.For more info see our blog:
http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=399
Tags: Gaming EntreCard
Posted in News | No Comments »
5 Habits To Avoid Click Fraud
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
I would like to show you five good pay per click campaign habits you should adopt to avoid click fraud.
1. Keep an eye on the competition
Do you know who else is competing on your keywords? These are the potential sources of competitor click fraud. Monitor your top ten most expensive keywords and see who is also running ads againt them.
Consider looking up the domain IP range of these companies and adding them to your exclusion lists. If a competitor cannot see your ads, they cannot click on them. NB this only works if they click from their own domain.
2. Monitor the Quality of Content Network Clicks
A large amount of publisher click fraud is generated from the content networks, if you advertise on these networks, monitor the quality of your clicks very closely, choose your partner sites carefully and don’t just accept any site . If you are unhappy with a particular site, add it to your exclusion list.
3. Keep Exclusions Lists and Update them Frequently
Protect your ads by not displaying them to people you suspect may be committing click fraud. To do this create and keep up to date exclusion lists.
There are two types of exclusion lists:
a) Domain Exclusion Lists - These lists stop your ads being displayed on content network sites.
b) IP exclusion List - The list to stop activity from suspicious IP addresses for example if one IP is constantly clicking on your ads.
4. Baseline your campaigns
Do you know what your average click through rate and conversion rate is? If you base line these regularly and have this information to hand, it makes spotting trends caused by click fraud much easier.
5. Submit Refund requests at least once a month
Become a thorn in the side of your ad suppliers, do not accept that their filters are fool-proof. If you suspect click fraud, collect the evidence and submit it at regular intervals (I recommend once a month) and do not take their first stock reply as law. Ask to speak to the manager, present your evidence, get your refund.
Tags: Click Fraud, Competitor Click Fraud, publisher click fraud
Posted in Features | No Comments »
Activism and Click Fraud
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
A number of months ago I wrote a speculative article on how click fraud could be used as a tool of activists.
The article Low Quality Clicks as a Means of Passive Demonstration painted a fictional picture on how the bottom line of an organisation can be effected by attacks on it’s internet advertising spend.
Whilst monitoring articles posted on the net, I came across this piece called operation deplete on how a group are advocating (using negative language) the clicking of their adversaries adsense ads. It was only a matter of time before my predictions came true.
DISCLAIMER: I do not condone the methods used by this group and I support neither the activists or the target of their protest.
Tags: Click Fraud
Posted in Features, News | No Comments »
Search Phrase Exposé
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
I am often amazed by the search phrases which bring visitors to my site, it also helps to confirm to me that people are searching for click fraud and low quality click resources so they can commit nefarious acts.
This list will be updated as new entries appear.
- how to setup rxbot - 12 Jun 2008
- how create fraud clicks
- program a clickbot
- how to perform click fraud
- american idol votes bot
Posted in News | No Comments »
Case Study - Sometimes It Ain’t Click Fraud
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
I was recently working with a client based in the US who had seen a masive increase in click through and no corresponsing increase in conversion. He contacted me with a view to investigate possible click fraud.
As a starting point I obtained an invalid click fraud report (see below). From this we can see an incredibly suspicious increase in clicks and cost per click
I asked for a copy of their web server logs to run through my analysis tool to see what was causing this problem.
The company works in the US mortgage space, a notoriously competitive and expensive place to advertise. An arena ripe for competitor click fraud attacks.
The client’s technical team went off to retrieve the logs for the particular weekend when the problem occcured, only to come back and report that the logs were not available. They could not be retrieved from the backups, they had gone missing! The month before and after were available but nothing for the suspicious weekend.
Lightbulbs lit up in my mind, but I did not want to alarm my client without any foundation. I thought this was an inside job.
Sure enough my client came back to me, a disgruntled employee had increased the cost per click and expanded the campaign widely . They also deleted the web server log files for the period in an effort to cover their tracks. The nett result was a click bill for perfectly valid clicks to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Needless to say the employee was shown the door very quickly.
The moral of the story, it’s not always click fraud, and only very trusted employees should be give the keys to your pay per click budget. The damage to the bottom line can be huge if your Adwords admin goes rogue.
These clicks were perfectly valid, and internal grudges is not an acceptable reason for a refund from Google.
Tags: Case Studies
Posted in Case Studies, Features | 1 Comment »