Posts Tagged ‘publisher 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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The Forgotten Victims of Click Fraud

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

I spend a lot of time writing about advertisers suffering from click fraud problems, but I think there is a forgotten victim of click fraud; the falsely accused content network publisher.

I read many blog posts from legitimate content network publishers running Adsense or Yahoo publisher network ads who are being banned due to click fraud attacks on their sites by competitors trying to remove them from the blogging niche.

Why Would This Happen?

If you are writing in a very crowded niche, there are only so many blogs and readers to go around. It is only natural that the driven and ambitious members of that niche will stop at nothing to get their share of attention, if their content is not quite up to scratch, it is time to turn to more dubious practices, make blogging in the niche financially inviable by removing a key revenue stream; their Google or Yahoo income.

How will this happen?

Your competitor will repeatedly click on your ads. The click fraud will be picked up by your ad provider and they will consider your account as fraudulent, you will then be banned from showing adsense/YPN ads.

As in all click fraud attacks, the actual clicking will be done via one or more of the following methods:

  • Manual clicking - a person sits and repeatedly clicks on ads.
  • Click Bots - the competitor will program a click bot to automatically clicks on your ads repeatedly.
  • Click Farms - your adversary will employ groups of people to manually click on your ads. As most blogs are small concerns, it is unlikely that click farms will be employed in this brand of click fraud.

What Should You Do?

I think the key to protecting your ad publisher income is to pro-actively monitor your ads, and to report any suspicious activity to your ad provider. If you are seen to report problems, Google or Yahoo will appreciate your transparency (something they never show to advertisers, but that is anther story all together) and you will hopefully be above suspicion.

The clicks will probably be marked as invalid and you will not benefit from that revenue generated, but I think the protection of your account as a long term revenue stream is more important.

What are you looking for?

Unusual click through levels, repeated clicks coming from the same IP address and clicks coming from weird user agents.

This will require analysis of your publisher metrics and access to your web server log files.

How The Heck Do I Do That?

A very good question, you can monitor for unusual click through rates from your Adsense or YPN account. Keep an eye out for unusual spikes in traffic. Unless you have done some pretty amazing blog marketing, your click through rate will be pretty flat, and a sudden increase in clicks is a warning you should take notice of.

With regards to analysing referral information, you will need a bit more technical knowledge, and I will leave this one for my next post on this subject.  In preparation for this you may want to review this excellent resource from Aaron Wall’s SEO Book:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml

I am keen to get other blogger’s opinions on this topic, please leave comments on any of the following subjects:

  • Can you recommend a plugin which gives you click tracking of your ads?
  • Have you been banned and re-instaed, how did you do this?
  • Do you suspect niche competitors are clicking on your ads

Ideally I would like to create a series of easy to install and update resources which can help to proactively monitor ads for click fraud

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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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Publisher Click Fraud

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

In this post I am bringing together all of the articles I have written about publisher click fraud in one central place.

As additional articles are added, this resource will be updated. Please subscribe to this blog to be notified of updates as they happen.

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What is Google’s Content Bid

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I want to spend a few moments talking about a function in Adwords called content bidding and how it can be useful in the fight against click fraud.

What is it?

If you advertise on Google’s content network, the home of the nefarious publisher click fraudsters, you need to understand content bidding.

A content bid allows an advertiser to set a separate price for clicks coming from the content network as opposed to the search results page. Google already reduce the price of content network click from the content network due to their measured lack of quality clicks, but a content bid allows you to go a step further and set the price of a click coming from a syndicated ad site.

Why it is relevant in a click fraud content?

By limiting your costs per click from the content network, you are implementing a control which limits your publisher click fraud risk to a level you are comfortable with. As in all PPC advertising analysis of metrics is key. If you are getting very few conversions reduce your content bid and concentrate on other areas to publish your ads.

The lower the price per click the less attractive you are to a publisher click fraudster, and be sure they have metrics in place to see which ads and keywords generate the most revenue.

I would advise everyone advertising on the content network to investigate content bids and to drastically reduce the amount they pay for content clicks versus search result clicks as the quality of the content click is far lower.

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What Is The Content Network?

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

I often talk about the problem of publisher click fraud from the content network, I thought it was worthwhile to write a short post explaining exactly what this network is.

The content network is a concept used by Google. The search engine giant syndicate Adword advertisments onto members of their content network through the Adsense programme.

Using adsense third party websites owners can add small pieces of code onto their site, and ads will be displayed. Google spiders the site to see what kind of content the site has and matches ads to this content, thereby having an in-context ad solution.

Google and the website owner then share the ad revenues. It is not know what the proportion of the share is, but it can be assumed that Google take the lion share.

The purpose of the content network is to increase the reach of adword ads. It is estimated that this enables Google to reach 80% of the Internet’s audience (Google’s own figures).

When you create an ad on the Adwords platform by default your ads are not displayed on the content network. You must explicitly opt into this program.

Content network clicks tend to be of a lower quality, meaning that fewer clicks convert into actual sales.

As a parting note, I always advise my clients to analyze their conversion rates from the content network. Do not use scatter gun approach, be selective and target sites you trust. Failure to do so will probably result in publisher click fraud attacks.

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How to Spot Publisher Click Fraud

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

In a previous post I gave a definition of publisher click fraud. I would like to expand upon this to give details on how to spot publisher click fraud from Google’s Adsense programme.

Capturing the Metrics

Every click from the content network comes complete with some very valuable information which helps catch the fraudster. This is called the referrer information. To get this information you will need access to an analytic package such as ClickTracks or be able to download your raw web server access logs.

When analysing the data, you should look for a string such as the one shown below.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0558200840132548&dt=1172774004749&lmt=1188167485&prev_fmts=468×60_as&;format=728×90_as&output=html&correlator=1172774004398&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_17_07.htm&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo

This may seem to be so much gibberish, but when it is parsed into more manageable chunks it is far easier to read.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads

client=ca-pub-0558200840132548

&dt=1172774004749

&lmt=1188167485

&prev_fmts=468×60_as

&;format=728×90_as

&output=html

&correlator=1172774004398

&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aminarts.com%2Faug_17_07.htm

&color_bg=FFFFFF&colo

Analyse the Metrics

When we break this down we see the unique publisher ID in the client section e.g ca-pub-0558200840132548 , and further down we can see the URL on which the advert was published. In this case the offending site was www.aminarts.com Please note this is data from a real click fraud attack. Full details of hte incident can be read on Click Fraud- A Story of Intrigue.

So we have the data, we know how to decipher the referrer string. It is now time to try and spot patterns in the data. The first stage is to spot repeated clicks from the same client publisher. This is of course not fraudulent clicks, rather it is the desired action from the content network. We need to correlate this data with repeated clicking from the same source. This is done by capturing the IP address.

The above may seem complicated, but it is relatively easy to do using excel, download your log file and import it into a spreadsheet. I will cover how to do this in a future post, please subscribe via RSS to get updates on future posts. The alternative is to subscribe to a click fraud software solution, these will spot multiple clicks from publishers for your automatically,check the review section of this site for information on the various solutions available.

At this point we have captured repeated clicks from one source address against one publisher, what does an Adwords user do next? Firstly supply the data to Google for a refund, please refer to my article Getting A Refund from Your PPC supplier for details on this. Next I would blocking my ads from thsi site. Consider if this site is giving you any return on your investment, if not, simply exclude the site using hte tools on your adwords account managment page.

campaign managment -> Tools -> Site Exclusion

I also use a belt and braces approach by excluding specific IP addresses from my campaigns to stop ads being displayed to repeate clickers. Again this is done from the tools section of your Adwords management page.

Conclusion

When conducting risk assessment reviews with my clients I ask, what value are you getting from advertising on the content network? Broadcast distribution to all and sundry is often very risky and the clicks are of low quality. If possible ditch these ads or target them more closely. Google now offers site targeting for CPC campaigns. This is where the advertiser can choose a site to display their ads on. It is advisable to choose site you feel you can trust.

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Publisher Click Fraud - A Definition

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

In a series of articles, I will discuss a particular branch of click fraud known as publisher click fraud.

In previous posts I have discussed competitor click fraud,where companies or individuals competing against you in the PPC rankings click on your ads in an attempt to deplete your daily budget, and hopefully remove your ads from the search engines. Publisher click fraud on the other hand is where webmasters syndicating pay per click ads from suppliers such as Google or Yahoo click on their own ads.

Ad Syndication

Syndication of ads is done by most of the major pay per click suppliers, perhaps the most widely used syndication system is Google’s Adsense program.

Using Adsense, webmasters are able to insert a small piece of code into their websites html and Google will display ads on their behalf. Google spiders or automatically reads the sites to find out it’s subject matter. Adverts are then displayed in context with the content of the website.

If a user of the website clicks on the links, a transaction occurs and the advertiser is charged an agreed amount. Google and the webmaster then take a share of this ad revenue.

The syndication and supply of ads on websites is a very common practice and it helps provide a small additional income to a large number of bloggers (including myself), the problem comes when unscrupulous website owners begin clicking on their own ads in an effort to increase their revenues.

How the fraud occurs

Publisher click fraud can happen in three main fashions:

The first is for the website owner or people he or she knows to repeatedly click on ads displayed on the website. This is probably the most ineffective method as it is widely suggested Google and the other search engines have fgilters in place to capture repeated clicks from the same IP address.

The second method is more technical and it involves the use of clickBots. A clickbot is a computer program controlled by a nefarious individual known as a Bot Herder. The Herder uses vulnerabilities in PC’s to create an army of infected computers which will run a program to click on a particular ad. The low noise level of hundreds (or even thousands) of individual IP addresses means this will probably go undetected by automatic filters
Thousands of clicks will occur, and generate substantial income. I reviewed Google’s analysis of a clickbot known as ClickBot.A, and Google state that attacks of this type can generate six figure incomes.

The last method of publisher click attack is via a click farm. Using this method, a small amount of money if paid to staff in the developing world to click on a link and pause on the target site, click on a few links, even sign up for a newsletter in the hope that the activity will appear to be that of a legitimate user. Each of these clicks on a link generate income, as long as the outgoings to the low paid worker are less than the click value, there is profit to be made.

How Much Fraud Happens

It is my opinion that there is a large amount of publisher click fraud happening, I was the subject of an attack whilst publishing Adwords ad on the content network, and Click Forensics, the publisher of the click fraud index have analysed the problem and suggest the percentage of clicks from the Adsense content network is in the 20s percent.

The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That’s up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.

In the next post in this series, I will discuss How to Spot Publisher Click Fraud

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Publisher Click Fraud - Video Guide

Monday, November 12th, 2007

In this video post, I present a video guide to understanding publisher click fraud

(Note video opens in a new windows)

View the video>>

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