Adwatcher Click Fraud Software Review

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

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In this post I review Adwatcher a Click Fraud software solution produced by MordComm Inc.

I have been using Adwatcher for some time now, and thought a review of their click fraud software may be of interest to readers of this blog.

How it works

Adwatcher like many click fraud offerings is first and foremost an analytic package, but it has a large number of click fraud monitoring functions.

Adwatcher comes in one of two offerings. The first is a hosted solution where all installation and configuration issues are dealt with by the Adwatcher staff. The second offering is a downloadable version which is hosted on a companies own server.

The downloadable version is a PHP and MySQL application which also requires the Zend optimizer, a free optimisation and PHP encryption solution.

Adwatcher works via the redirection method as discussed in Mechanics of Click Fraud Software. Changes are made to your PPC campaigns to redirect all ads to a specific landing page. This page captures the metrics of the click before redirecting to the true target page. For each target page required, a landing page must be created in the Adwatcher console.

Features

As previously mentioned, Adwatcher has many functions over and above click fraud monitoring, but for the purposes of this review, I will only be highlighting the features which are specifically relevant to click fraud detection.

Fraud Settings

Adwatcher enabled you to set your own tolerance for click fraud. The fraud setting specifies the number of clicks in a defined time period which you would like to set as your tolerance for click fraud.

Suspicious Activity Alert

One of the features which differentiates Adwatcher from other click fraud solutions is the suspicious activity alert. If adwatcher detects multiple clicks, a warning error will be displayed (an example is shown below) to the person clicking on your ads. This type of interception of click fraud at source and issuing a deterring warning would be very difficult to do with javascript type click fraud solutions.

WARNING – Suspicious Behaviour Detected

Your internet location has been detected visiting this site more than 5 times over the past 24 hours. Your information and IP address has been logged and sent to the owner of the advertising campaign.

We appreciate your interest and thank you for your visits. However, to protect our customers from higher prices by keeping our advertising costs down, we routinely examine recurrent visitations from their advertising campaigns.

Please help us pass the savings on to you by bookmarking our site for future reference.

E-mail Alerts

Adwatcher has an e-mail alerting function to warn when suspected click fraud has occurred. There is also an SMS function to send text messages to cell phones. NB this only currently works with US carriers.

Generate Refund Request

Probably one of the most powerful functions of the software is the automatic generation of refund requests. At the click of a button, a report is generated showing fraudulent activity which can then be passed onto your PPC supplier as part of a refund or credit request.

Spike Analysis

Spike analysis is an interesting function of Adwatcher. It trends your normal campaign activity and enables analysis of spikes in activity. For example if your normal click rate was 100 clicks per day, running a spike analysis it is very easy to spot anomalies where 2x , 4x up to 10x the normal click activity is happening.

Concerns

Some of the issues I have noted with Adwatcher are shown below:

Activity from Google is classed as click fraud. By default I would recommend adding Google to the list of IPs which can create multiple clicks. The testing tools on your Adwords account appear as click fraud.

I used the hosted version and I was concerned that referrer information would be lost as all clicks would be referred from an adwatcher server. Being a bit obsessive about my stats this was a concern. An investigation of the advanced options showed that there is an option to retain referrer information and pass it through to your other analytic tools.

My final concern is with the hosted version of the software. If for any reason, the hosting servers go down, your campaign clicks will return a 404 file not found error. I must quickly add I have no evidence of this happening, and I trust a company of Mordcomm’s integrity to have the appropriate fault tolerant systems in place.

On-Line Demo

Adwatcher has a demo version of their hosted solution for review. It is useful to check out the features mentioned above. There are also numerous flash training resources.

Pricing

At the time of writing (Nov 2007) the pricing of Adwatcher was based around the number of paid clicks a site receives and if you use the hosted or self hosted version, the prices are taken from Adwatcher’s own site

Free Trial

Adwatcher supply a 30 day free trial demo. This is a fully functional version of the system. I took on a demo of the hosted option before opting for another option and forgot to cancel the credit card authorisation once the demo was up. I contacted the support team and was very quickly reimbursed, something not so quickly forthcoming from some companies offering 30 day free trials.

Conclusion

Adwatcher is one of my favourite click fraud software solutions, it produces huge amounts of top quality evidence to supply to your PPC supplier, in fact I used Adwatcher to capture the click fraud evidence I supplied to Google in the post Click Fraud a story of intrigue.

There will be an effort to retro fit existing campaigns to meet the new requirements, and this could be a large task for companies with big campaigns, but I believe this is true of all click fraud solutions.

If you don’t already have a click fraud software supplier, I highly recommend you try a demo of their solution.

Tags: click fraud software
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