Click Fraud may hit G's performance

Increased coverage on 'click fraud' and rising awareness that this is not just a problem of the also run.

As this revenue is 98% of G's income further coverage of this may well impact on G's stock performance.

Here is an article highlighting this.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/02/technology/google_fraud/?cnn=yes

G is thightliped about it but from personal experience they are pretty good at it but I also see increasing paybacks due to CF.
M

 

This definitely hurt big G. They really don't have much choices. They need both advertisers and publishers to keep their business running.

 

the problem of CF and the ongoing massive development of fairly useless pages just to show ADs is making adverisers nervous.

Myself and some people I talk to start reducing ad exposure to native G as we do not wish our ads to be shown on "useless" pages where the visitor clicks ads just get to some usefull info.

That is the second biggest problem for G.

M

 

In the past month there have been more stories about click fraud than in the past year. I think the topic is just beginning to heat up, and the PPC guys are really afraid of the response from advertisers who may finally realize they are getting ripped off.

 

Yeah click fraud is pretty obnoxious. I used to try to have my adwords ads placed high enough on occassion to show up but there were so many dead clicks it was pointless and too costly.

 

I'm new to these forums, and fairly new to adwords. I started in October. I have a small personal website, and most of my income comes from searches rather than ads, but I have noticed that many of my ad clicks have very low payouts recently. Some are even zero. Do you think this is a result of this click fraud?

 

What are the major methods of click fraud? I mean, is it people clicking their OWN ads? And the competitors ads? If so, this would SEEM pretty easy to track.

If they log IP's and see that xxx.xxx.xxx.xx is clicking competitor.com's site 100 times a day then they should look at that as possible fraud. Same with your own ads. If your login IP is 50%+ of your clicks, it's more than likely fraud.

Is it not that easy?

I'm sure there is more to it, and that is what I am asking "What are the methods of click fraud"?

 

Low payout depends on the competitiveness of the potential keyword targeted based on your site / page content and overall theming.

Zero payout is normaly due to type public service ads which do not generate any income for ADS to share.

M

 

-People clicking on competitors ads on a regular basis
-Bots designed to click adsense ads to make publishers $
-Agreements between webmasters to click on each others ads
and much, much more.

Personally I don't think the PPC co's are doing enough to stop it. They are making easy money and people don't have much other choice.

Just because you see a low payout doesn't mean it is click fraud, but a lot of people don't realize what is going on with click fraud. One competitor and his two friends clicking on your ad on G and O once per day for a year can charge you for 2,000 clicks in a year without batting an eye.