Posts Tagged ‘Invalid Clicks’

How To Create an Invalid Clicks Report - Video Guide

Monday, October 8th, 2007

In a previous post Click Fraud To Do List I discussed how overlooked, but very important the invalid click reporting function is. In this multi media vPost I show how to generate an invalid click report.

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Problem With Google’s Invalid Click Reporting Function

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

A quick post to raise a rye smile, I was submitting my usual monthly click fraud report and it is too big for the Google system to handle and it was rejected, there is just too much fraudulent activity from the content network this month.

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$1 Billion, the cost of invalid clicks

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Google has estimated that invalid clicks cost them $100 million in lost sales per percentage point, they go onto say that the invalid click rate they are seeing is 10%. This equates to a staggering $1 billion in lost revenue.

In an interview for Forbes Shuman Ghosemajumder Google’s manager for trust and safety said:

Our invalid clicks rate — the activity rate — has remained in the range of less than 10 percent of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million [U.S.] per year in potential revenue foregone

This figure is comprised of all the clicks that Google’s filters intercept and mark as invalid, this type of click will include actual click fraud from bots etc along with things such as reloads which count as a double click.

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Google’s Invalid Click Detection System Confirmed

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I was very pleased to see that the Google invalid click detection system had intercepted some suspicious activity on my adwords account.

I was running a campaign to drive traffic to this site, in particular to advertise our consultancy services and a number of low quality clicks were captured by my click fraud monitoring software.

I was repeatedly clicked by the same IP address over a period of a few minutes. I took this information and matched it back to my adwords campaign and not only had I not been charged for the clicks, but they had not been registered on my account.

I am very pleased with the outcome, but the lack of visibility of this information is still a concern. Why should I be using third party products to prove Google is catching low quality (or even fraudulent clicks).

I intend to leave the monitoring in place and ensure all future invalid clicks are not registered and to capture evidence on attacks not catered for by the Google algorithm.

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Yahoo Create Traffic Quality Centre

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

In a similar move to Google, Yahoo has create a click fraud resource which they call the Traffic Quality Center

My first impression is that this is a comprehensive tools for Yahoo advertisers.

More soon …

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Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Google have created a new resource centre for click quality.

Click quality is the Google euphemism for controlling click fraud (okay okay invalid clicks) and although there does not appear to be any new technical resources on the site, the overview makes very interesting reading for anyone interested in how Google’s various layers of click fraud detection work.

The introduction from the site reads:

About the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
The relationship between
Google and AdWords advertisers is built on trust. Advertisers rely on the
relevance of our ad placement, our reporting statistics, and the quality of the
clicks their ads receive. We take this trust seriously, and we know that AdWords
couldn’t exist without it.
In order to stay abreast of your concerns, we
constantly speak with advertisers and keep a close eye on online advertising
journals and blogs. We’ve seen that many of you have questions about click fraud
and the impact it might have on your AdWords accounts. In particular, we’ve
heard your concerns about ‘click farms’ and the quality of clicks received on
the content network. To help address these and related issues, we’ve created
this website to aggregate various resources on click fraud.
We hope that you
find this resource center useful. We’re still working on expanding the website
and are eager to incorporate your feedback. Feel free to pass along
your suggestions on how it could better suit your needs.

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Google’s Click Quality Mission Statement

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

The mission of Google’s click quality team, the group of individuals tasked with developing antidotes for and responding to click fraud have revealed their mission statement.

The mission states:

Protect Google’s advertising network and provide excellent customer service to clients. We do that by:

  • Vigilantly monitoring invalid clicks/impressions and removing its source
  • Reviewing all client requests and responding in a timely manner
  • Developing and improving systems that remove invalid clicks.impressions and properly credit clients for invalid traffic
  • Educating clients and employees on invalid clicks/impressions.

If this commentator could add another item to the mission it would be

“Report transparently to clients on invalid clicks”

Extracted from the Tuzhilin Report.

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