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John Marshall of ClickTracks says that there are two fundamental types of click fraud and that most harbor misconceptions about each. At Chicago’s Search Engine Strategies, WebProNews took a moment out to discuss this and other issues with Marshall.
Type one happens on search results page. In this scenario a childish competitor clicks your ads, ad infinitum, until they’ve run out your budget, effectively removing your presence. Type two happens on a publisher’s site. Here, someone builds a site, populates it with ads, then employs a bot net to click ads and raise a profit at the advertiser’s expense.
Contrary to popular belief, type one is much more rare. According to Marshall, rule one of click fraud inoculation is, “follow the money.” When that trail is blazed, surely we’ll corner our fraud but (in some scenarios) wouldn’t search engines stand to benefit? Google gets a portion of click pays in the same manner as the publisher. Is there an incentive in such cases for search engine’s to battle click fraud?
Marshall think so. “In the end, it irritates advertisers like you wouldn’t believe!” Thus, it stands to reason that (as their major source of income) search engines would like to keep them happy.
On the issue of progression within the battle on click fraud, Marshall points out our inequities and strengths, “There’s a fundamental problem… in that completely automated techniques to detect this are extremely difficult to develop. Since there’s a financial incentive on the part of click fraud perpetuator to make it happen. You have an arms race where any automated technique that you have ends up being defeated. It’s impossible for engines to completely rein in and detect this. There’s a certain amount that advertisers MUST do… (they) should be looking at the data.”
Even though it’s an unpopular theory, Marshall believes that no fully automated system will ever succeed… it’s the warning systems and human intervention which will make for a better solution to click fraud.
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What Google does with revenue sharing is a forward thinking and extremely positive thing for the internet as a whole. It encourages people to create and maintain quality websites which benefit all users of the interent. I agree that there are potentially fraudlent sites who use these bots to generate clicks, but it is easy to identify which sites your traffic is coming from and then stop your ads appearing on that site if you think the clicks are fradulent and/or the content on that site is not relevant to your services or products. I think click fraud on publisher sites is a bit of a non issue if the refering site stats are monitored and reacted to accordingly. Obviously these people who set up a site for one week to carry out these automated click frauds will be hard (though not impossible and in the extreme minority) to detect, the effectiveness of paid search results far outweigh any negatives of click fraud. The internet would be a much, much poorer place without revenue sharing.
Search engines like Google should provide more revenue share to genuine publishers and gradually decrease to suspicious sites. I feel that when a publisher is suddenly shut from the system, they feel aggressive and start a new site for click frauds. In effect, they should be gradually demotivated by positively reinforcing the good ones.
There is a way to prevent type 2 click-fraud. The search-engines must STOP revenue sharing… how greedy have the search engines become??? Participating in revenue sharing on a typical merchant site accounts for “pennies” a month… the only way to make serious money by taking part in revenue sharing is to resort to click-fraud…. The search engines know this and they can stop it anytime by discontinuing the revenue sharing. Don’t they make enough without it??? So let’s stop talking about developing an automated solution to spot this type of click-fraud…. we all know how it can be eliminated permanently…. so please, everyone stop dancing around. Let’s all start putting serious pressure on the Search Engines to eliminate revenue-sharing.
This automated system has potential, I think there is no fraud intended. It is presented as an advertising link for quick reference at $1.00 per pixel.
Great discussion. Marshall mentioned a tool he sells that is somewhat reliable to detect patterns of fraud. Does anyone know of any free tools or methods (not automated) that a webmaster can use to see potential click fraud?