Stop Click Fraud

I just posted this on Webmasterworld but I wanted your guys opinion...

Thoughts?

Is there not a possiblility to give webmasters using adsense more peace of mind by alleviating click fraud from the adsense iframe.
For instance - would it not be possible to get the remote host of the person clicking the ad? Usually even if a person is using a proxy, it can be bypassed and the actual IP can be retrieved.

Ok lets say this CAN be done - i.e. the IP address of a person who has clicked an adsense ad can be logged by adsense.

So now adsense are logging clickthrough IP's and whatever else they choose. Now all they need to do is offer adwords or adsense publishers the following account option:

Allow the same IP to click on my ad's XXX times per day.

Now via the iframe they would check the ad ID, the user's IP and if that IP has exceeded his daily click ratio - only "charity" or free ads will be shown to this user on this particular domain etc etc.

Sounds plausible to me - why can it not be done? It would alleviate click fraud, make us webmasters sleep better and take the onus off google to completey control click fraud by giving the advertisers and webmasters more say.

Think about it - if someone has clicked on an ad 25 times in one day the adwords guy has spent enough money and the website owner has made enough money off this IP,so why not block it for the day either from the adwords account or the webmaster's adsense account.

 

There is one major reason you won't see this happen:

Google makes less money this way

 

I agree with yfs1

As long as google is making huge amounts of cash. Nothing will change. Once Google, starts making less money, then they will look at this.

Maybe abit offtopic, but I was wondering. Is it considerd click fraud is someone else comes on my site and keeps on clicking my ads? Will I be punished?

 

I think they will actually draw more advertisers this way. Wouldn't you as an advertiser feel safer by being given this control - effectively being able to stop click fraud on your ads? Google should be able to see that in the long run it will pay off for them as more publishers will regain confidence in the program.

 

When you have as many advertisers as they do, the number gained compared to the money lost isn't even close.

We all complain about click fraud but most of use still use it. Why? Because you still make money with it. Maybe not as much as if they clamped down on click fraud but enough to not want to leave in protest.

 

You were talking about proxies...some are tracable, but most are not, also you can get a proxy in a country that won't help out in the first place. Check out this site for what I'm talking about. What goog should do is ban all known proxy IP's

http://www.samair.ru/proxy/

 

Wouldn't this idea also break some sites privacy policies?

 

Google already get visitor's IP addresses via their Javascript - the browser requests the .js file directly from Google's servers.

I think this would be rather difficult to police though - some IPs can quite legitimately create hundreds of clicks a day, for example offices that have hundreds of staff but only one public IP behind NAT.