PPC and Fraud

The recent

 

There was a long thing about this on slashdot. Sorry, I don't have the link. But the thing that struck me most strongly, if I remember right, was something about proving you're a human before viewing the ad. I believe you do this by being shown a picture of a randomly generated word like

go7garka

in a font that is all screwy and warped, not machine readable, but human readable. (A real life example of this, is when you apply for a yahoo email account.) You would type the word, and then be allowed to view the ad.

If clickthrough fraud became a serious problem, which is a real possibility in my view, this would be the solution I would favor. A bit inconvenient for the user, but not that bad. And after all, if having to prove his identity is such a hardship that they don't want to bother, maybe he wasn't such a valuable customer and you would rather save the money for the click.

I am sort of paranoid by nature and would favor a solution like this. I'm not an expert, but my impression is that ip spoofing is pretty hard to prevent, and you only need one good scamsketeer who knows how to program to sell it to a couple of spammers, then the fraud speads like a virus and the fraud gets copied again and again. The feds just arrested a guy who tried to do this with google, but how long before the next guy comes up with the program, but this time does it right and goes to the Russian spammers first. Probably happened already.

Best regards,

Thomas.

 

Yea, typing a code before you could click on an ad would quickly dimish the number of click throughs. Imagine if every site on the interent required a code (just for example) to access it...what a nightmare.

 

Other than being able to harm you competitor there is no advantage to being able to do a lot of AdWord click throughs. You can't make any money that way. The only people to gain is Google itself and the person who pays is the advertiser.

However with AdSense it is an entirely different thing. Now for every false click through some web owner is getting part of Googles income. The advertisor still suffers because he pays for both the AdWord click through and the AdSense click through.

But suddenly there is a payoff for the fraudulent clicker. I can't see any high volume false click program succeeding, but a network of reciprocal clickers would probably work. You make a deal with a few other web masters such that you will click on their site 'x' times per day and they will click on yours. You couldn't make big money but depending on the number of AdSense ads you run and the number of reciprocal arrangements you setup you could make a few extra bucks a day and probably never be detected.

 

I've always wondered...

Do you think Google prevents "day after day" clicks on the same ads from the same IP address? At what point does Google consider a click fraudulent?

 

However, at some point the cost/benefit cross factors in. At that point the market will decide whether it's worth the time and effort (roi) to continue.

 

I'm not sure we should discuss this much further. It might appear that we are advocating this practice.

 

Exactly true. I ran a campaign for a major portal in the online casino sector. It basically required users to go to a landing page explaining the requirement for responsible gambling. That one intervening step drastically reduced click thru rates and the program was quickly ended.

 

I think that "some point" is yesterday, today & tomorrow. Every Adwords account I manage (6 or 7 at the present time, not including my own) is analyzed at a minimum of every other week. If my clients don't see a decent ROI - ar at least a break even - they never stay with the program longer than 60 days.

For the accounts/markets a I manage, I see new competition pop up and existing competition drop all the time.

My "day job" involves marketing with direct mail on a very large scale. I've been doing it for about 9 years. The draw to DM is that it was always one of the most measurable forms of diret marketing. 4 - 6 weeks after a mailing you can tell with actual figures if the campaign was successful. Adwords is like electronic direct mail, without the 4 - 6 week wait.

 

This is something I posted in another thread but it is relavent here...

I paid for Overture's PPC service and someone set up a links website that had links to other sites related to my site. In the first few weeks I could see in my stats that I received over 700 clicks (with overture ID's in the links) originating from this links site. I didn't think this sounded right so I contacted the owner of the site and asked what his motive was. I figured he was somehow acting as an affiliate, and he was getting paid for these clicks by Overture. He gave me a one line bogus answer and the next day the site was offline.

I contacted Overture to find out if I was being charged for these clicks. I noticed that my overture clicks per day immediately fell by the amount I was getting from this site. So yes, I was paying for them, but Overture denied it and then they said they would pass it along to someone else to research but I didn't hear from them for weeks. So I was pissed and cancelled.

How this third party was making money I don't know but there was an obvious motive for him to send me clicks.

My point in my other post was that I was getting a 3 on Yahoo rank before I cancelled overture but as soon as I cancelled, I started to get a zero. (I have since reinstated the account, because it does work, and probably will continue until I can figure out this SEO myself).

My point in this post is that overture was not there for me. I paid for their golden membership or something like that where I was supposed to get superior service etc., but they didn't seem too concerned about this potential fraud that cost me a couple hundred dollars. I guess they thought I was paying for clicks and I was getting them, regardless of how bogus they were.

 

Hi.

We are looking for PPC advertisers (using Google and others) who are interested in participating in a study to determine how many fraudulent click throughs they get via anonymous proxies (aka open proxies).

Country Check prides itself on being able to block most of these anonymous proxies and by conducting this study we hope to be able to determine the level of risk to PPC advertisers.

The study will involve changing the url of the page that the surfer is sent to being replaced by our code which redirects allowed users through to the content while blocking those using anonymous proxies.

By blocking anonymous proxy users, a webmaster will be able to quickly notice any possible fraudulent click throughs that they are being charged for.

If anyone is interested, please email me at

Cheers,

Adam

 

PPC Fraud

No need for lots of IPs - AOL does it for you

 

that's not exclusive to AOL, that should happen with any dialup ISP

 

if your ads have only.05 to .50 USD on google no one click many time, 2nd you have to be smart, you have option in your google adword that your ads only dispaly on google, the main prob..is with adsense i think..

 

2nd ly because of few the hole CPC mkt..going down..

 

I think the allegations of fraud does more than fraud itself to harm PPC programs. The potential certainly exists, but the major players like Google have mechanism in place to combat it. As an Google publisher and advertiser, I'm more concerned about these articles than the actual fraud that is being committed.

 

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