Archive for the ‘News’ Category

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.

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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.

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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

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Reader Survey

Friday, June 20th, 2008

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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.

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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

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End of My blogging Sabatical

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

I have take about six weeks off from updating this blog to concentrate on a special project from one of my clients. This has taken up the majority of my time so I have not had time to update this blog.

I am happy to say the project is at an end and normal service is now being resumed.

During this break there have been a number of things of note to write about, most of all the partnership between Yahoo and Click Forensics. I will be dicussing what this suggests in posts very soon.

I have been asked to talk at the monthly Click Quality Council meeting for May. I am looking forward to that a great deal. The work of the Click Quality Council is very important in the fight against click fraud, I will begin to write more blogs about their work in the future.

Thanks for bearing with the pause in service - Neil Matthews

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Is Google’s Request for Your Data Aimed at Click Fraud

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I wrote an article entitled Does Google Have Enough Data to Combat Invalid Clicks on the Click Fraud Network blog. In this post I talk about the fact that Google does not have the all important post click data in it’s fight against click fraud.

In a recent change to my analytics account, Google requested that they share my analytic information within the companies other business areas including Adsense and Adwords. Here is the request:

Google Analytics Data Sharing Settings

In order to improve your experience with Google products, Google Analytics is updating its data sharing policy. You now have the ability to share your Analytics data with other Google services. This will improve integration, enable additional features in Google’s advertising services (including Google Analytics, AdWords and AdSense) and improve your experience with these products.

Press “Accept” to enable data sharing between Google Analytics and other Google services or for additional options, choose “More data sharing options”.

One the the things that I think Google are attempting to do is to collect the all important post click data in order to improve their invalid click filters.

Whilst this may not be 100% effective due to the fact people can disable javascript or a click bots could  be in and out of a site before the script load, this will give Google a sample of data to help develop their filters.

This poses a question; why do they need additional data for their almost perfect filters. Google claims that only 0.02% of click fraud clicks get through.

This confirms my feelings that Google does not have all the data to fight click fraud, and that their lack of visibility on the subject hides a bigger problem.

Are you planning to give Google your data, please leave a comment.

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In The Words of Alanis Morisette …

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

… isn’t it ironic.

My adwords campaign bidding on MFA related keywords was displayed on, yes you guessed it, an MFA.

I am not advertising on the content network, this was a click from one of Google’s trusted partners who are part of the search network. To me this is a garbage click of zero quality. I am going to attempt a refund request, but I am not holding my breathe. I am not sure I can even exclude this site, but I will try.

This is a essence of the click quality problem, I paid the rate for a high quality click from a search partner such as AOL but the click came from an Adsense for Domains MFA.

Here is a screen dump of the site, I’ll not give out the URL, they are not getting any traffic from me.

Seedy adwords for domain ads

I discovered this using the low quality techniques I employ in my consultancy services

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Adsense PIN Program

Monday, February 18th, 2008

My adsense PIN arrived in the post today, and whilst I am not running adsense ads on my blogs at the moment, I appreciate Google’s step to reduce content network click fraud.

Google has put a stop on account payouts until a PIN sent via surface mail is entered to your Adsense account.  The letter includes details on how to report PIN numbers sent to an address incorrectly.

Why I think Google has taken this step?

I believe that Google is suffering from a large number of illicit signups  for Adsense, and this process ensures that any accounts assigned to a physical address are real.

Any account which does not enter it’s PIN has the payout stopped.  I would be very interested to find out if accounts which are not activated have the clicks marked as invalid and refunds given to the advertiser, I doubt it.

The content network is increasingly providing low quality clicks, and this step by Google to remove fraudulent accounts can only be greated with open arms.

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