Posts Tagged ‘Competitor Click Fraud’

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.

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Competitor Click Fraud

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I have created a series of definition articles describing what competitor click fraud is,who and why they would do it and what to do in the event of an attack.

I have brought all of the article together in one post, with links to the individual articles shown below:

  • Competitor Click Fraud - A Definition
  • How to Spot Competitor Click Fraud
  • How To Stop Competitor Click Fraud

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How To Stop Competitor Click Fraud

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

In the first two part of the series on competitor click fraud I created a definition of competitor click fraud, then went on to discuss how to spot competitor click fraud, now I will talk about how you can stop those pesky competitors clicks.

The most valuable piece of information you will have collected during your investigation into competitor fraud is the domain details of your competition. Using a service such as whois.org it is possible to do a reverse lookup of the domain name to get the IP address range of the company. Alternatively, the domain will be masked and you will already have a suspect IP address.

Equipped with the IP address head off to your PPC supplier and exclude the IP address from being able to access your ads. This stops your competitor dead in their tracks by not displaying your ad to any computer with the IP address (or range of addresses) you supply.

Using the belt and braces approach I then go on to ensure no competitors are able to display my ads on their domains by adding their name to my excluded list with regards to content network displays from Google.

So up to this point we have excluded machines from seeing our ads, the next point is to tell-tales. Make a report to Google about your findings, stating explicitly that you believe you have been the subject of a competitor fraud, refer to my article Getting a refund from your PPC supplier for details contacting the search engines.

The above points should be more than enough to stop competitor clicks, your only recourse if they keep attacking you is to contact your local legal team for a cease and desist letter. This will only work if your competitor is in the same jurisdiction as yourself. This of course may force the company to more underhand and alarming click fraud attacks through ClickBots or click farms.

I advise most people who are the subject of click fraud to look into one of the inexpensive click fraud monitoring solutions. They help to identify invalid clicks much more easily and provide a wealth of evidence to give to the search engines for your refund. Make it a matter of course to create a monthly report for fee refunds.

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How to Identify Competitor Click Fraud

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

In the second article in our series on competitor click fraud, I go on to detail how to spot competitor click fraud.

In a previous article I documented the tell tale signs of click fraud, this post will expand upon those ideas to help identify specific competitor click fraud.

The first stage is to be aware of your competitors. There is a very simple way to tell who your potential click fraud competitors are:

Type your key words into your search engine of choice and your competitors will be revealed to you, under the sponsored link section. Take some time to note the domain names of your competitors including the companies who are not reaching the first page as they are more likely to engage in dubious practices to get their ads on the first page.

This must come with the caveat that all of your competitors are not advertising all of the time so they may slip through the net, the answer to this is to search for your competitors a number of times, and at different times during the day.

Equipped with this information it is now time to fire up your analytics program. They key piece of data you should be analysing is the domain metric. This will either be the IP address of the person visiting or in the case of a corporate system, a NAT address coming from the domain of the competitor. If you are presented with an IP address use the IP to Domain name lookup tools from www.whois.org to find out who the perp is.

In the next part of our competitor click fraud series, I will discuss what to do if you are the victim of this type of invalid click. Should you go in all guns blazing or are there more subtle tools in your arsenal?

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Competitor Click Fraud - A Definition

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

A question I am often asked is “What is competitor click fraud?” In this post I aim to create a definitive answer to that question.

Firstly I would like to paint a scenario for our definition, your company is advertising on a pay per click provider, for clarity of our scenario, I will say it is Google. You are bidding on one of the extremely aggressive keywords such as “home mortgage” and your company is prepared to pay 25 USD per click for a lead into this very lucrative market, and your daily advertising budget is 2000 USD.

With the above scenario in place we can see how attractive competitor click fraud is, but what is it?

In brief another company bidding on the same keywords as you will click on your ads in an effort to deplete your daily budget. Your company will pay for the click, but the click will never create a return on investment.

Competitor companies will do this for one of two reasons:

1) To stop your ad running on Google and place theirs with less competition. They do this by clicking on your ad until your daily budget is reached and Google stops displaying your ads as instructed.

2) To reduce their cost per click i.e. if they want to pay 23 USD per click, your ability to pay 25 USD will keep them off the top spot and possibly the all important first page. Geting rid of the competition lets them control the max cost per click

I mention that is is attractive to commit click fraud, why do I say this? It is a simple question of economics, if it costs 25 USD to tempt a user onto the site, eighty clicks would deplete our fictional budget and create a charge with no return on investment against a competitor company. It’s a ruthless world out there.

The mechanics of competitor click fraud are exactly the same as another type of click fraud, it will be manually via a person sitting and clicking on your ads, the next level up will be from a click farm where groups of people will be paid to click on your links and lastly via a clickbot or automated software program which will create the invalid clicks.

So now you know what competitor click fraud is, in the next article in our series I will tell you how to spot if you are a victim of competitor click fraud.

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