http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/trp/1744861724.html

this guy is engaging in click fraud.

We’ve discussed in the past what a great source of leads Google’s content network can be- it can help you reach customers you didn’t even know you wanted to reach, or customers who didn’t even know they wanted your product!

But the content network isn’t all fun and games. You can discover and sell to new consumer audiences, but guess what? You’re also exposing yourself to new scammer audiences! Neat.

To understand the cautions I’m going to extend here, you need to understand how the content network operates. If you look at Google’s official “sample” of content network partners, things look fabulous! My ads for flash frozen organic baby food can show on Baby Center and Dr. Spock.com! But as anyone who actually advertises on the content network knows, Dr. Spock isn’t paying Google’s bills. We can all try to run our baby food ads there all day, and they’re still only going to show 3-7 ads on a page.

Clearly, more sites showing ads = more clicks = more money for Google.  Therefore, they would like as many sites in their advertiser network as possible. To be fair, more money for Google should also mean more money for us, if we do a good job of making sure we’re matched to industry-relevant sites and know how to convert our traffic. But don’t forget there’s another player here- the middleman, whoever owns the site you’re advertising on. These people can show ads on just about any type of site (including parked domains) via Google’s AdSense targeting.  The “Middleman” advertiser determines the topic he wants his page to show ads for and if your ads match that content or specified topic, they can show there. You pay Google for the clicks you receive on that site, Google pays Middleman, your customers pay you, everyone is happy. Or so it should be.

Though Google tries- often successfully- to match your ads to relevant sites, this isn’t Advertiser Utopia and things don’t always come up sunshine and rainbows. There are Sinister Middlemen in the world, and they want to steal all of your money. Unfortunately, those experienced in PPC understand the term “click fraud”…and if you run ads on the content network, you’d better understand it especially well, because you’re going to find it.

Take for example the lovely culbpenguin.com and its friends, clubpinguin.com, wwwclubpengun.com, and about seventy other variations on the perfectly benign Disney site, www.clubpenguin.com. They started showing up in our content network automatic placements a couple of months ago, en masse, and spent nearly $1000 in one day.

Somehow hundreds and hundreds of people visiting the site pictured below, a misspelling of a children’s game website, were clicking on book publishing ads.  Curiously, none of them were converting. How interesting. Weeding them out and asking for a refund from Google was a fiasco. Some of the sites are gone today, and some are still live- showing ads based on a different theme, as you can see. It’s a disaster, and if the URLs for these had been more varied, it would have taken a lot longer to catch on to the problem, since most of them did not spend a lot of money individually. I’m sure we are being click-defrauded every day on the content network, but working with the content network at this point in time is a matter of making sure you reduce fraud as much as possible (by doing things such as excluding your ads from being shown on parked domains and error pages and keeping watch for unusual placements or traffic behaviors) and making sure you’re seeing a positive ROI from this distribution network.

So how do you determine your ROI? Conversion metrics can help a lot with this, but as anyone who has ever monitored a website’s form submissions could probably tell you, little robots know how to submit forms, too. It doesn’t seem to be as widespread as click fraud, but conversion fraud- I’m afraid it could be the wave of the future in cheating other people. Whether it’s for the same old reasons that people like to submit spam forms, or it’s Sinister Middleman trying to convince you that his site does, in fact, convert so you should keep targeting it, this equals bad data for your ROI determinations.

If your website’s leads come via form submissions or inquiries without any type of spam reduction method, and don’t require payment, know that there is a possibility they could be invalid. If you don’t have direct access to your actual lead data- the information submitted by the converting visitor- you need to be sure to coordinate with whoever has that data to ensure that the conversions you see are real human leads.  I’ve seen conversions from sites I thought were nonsense be actual leads, and I’ve seen conversions from nonsense sites be total trash. The content network is much like everything else in PPC- there’s just no way to effectively manage without valid, visible data throughout the impression-to-conversion process. And it never hurts to keep your eye out for giggling thieves.

source: http://www.ppchero.com/sunshine-rainbows-and-fraud-on-the-content-network/

A client recently contacted me because they were concerned that their former PPC bid management company overcharged them for their services and inflated bid costs. Since I’ve been managing their PPC accounts over the past 6 months, they have reduced costs by over 45%, increased their clickthrough rate by 30%, and increased their conversion rate by over 4 times – all while growing revenue by 37%.

Before I took over the account, I was able to get a keyword report from the company that I stole the business from. Their report was full of over-priced and under-performing keywords. It was a classic case of a PPC management company just paying for position and not worrying about ROI. They carelessly spent 10’s of thousands of dollars of my client’s money on poor keywords.

By focusing on conversion and ROI, I have made such huge improvements to their PPC accounts that my client is actually auditing their former PPC manager. They feel that the company must have been inflating bid cost and passing the cost along to them. I really hope that they don’t find fraud, because the poor bidding job they did in the past was bad enough.

What’s the takeaway? Make sure you hire someone that will care about your profitability. Also make sure they are open with their information. No one should be denying you access to your own AdWords account; that’s where bid inflation can easily be hidden. Finally, the number one easiest way to avoid bid inflation is to use your own credit card and don’t let the company invoice you for the click spend. There is nothing more legit than a charge straight from Google.

Happy bidding!

What happens if someone keeps clicking repetitively on my ad?
The Click Protection System uses a variety of techniques to filter clicks before they show up as a charge on your reports. Detecting click fraud is very complex and requires arduous analysis, and we work hard to develop and update the Click Protection System. Maintaining advertiser satisfaction is a top priority, which is why we also have dedicated employees who are vigilant in their analysis of potential click fraud.

What is the Click Protection System?
The Click Protection System is designed to detect click fraud. We receive billions of searches per month which lead to several million clicks onto ads each day. We strive to ensure that our customers are satisfied with their advertising experience and work to maintain productive and active relationships with advertisers. As part of our effort to maintain advertiser satisfaction, we utilize the Click Protection System, which includes sophisticated software that evaluates each of our advertisers’ clicks.
Our Click Protection System uses search and click data to make both rules-based inferences and pattern recognition-based inferences about which clicks constitute click fraud. While the details cannot be disclosed, the core mechanics involve many data points.

If the data points indicate click fraud, our Click Protection System software marks the identified click in our billing system, and the advertiser is not charged for it. However, the advertiser still receives the click through and we are therefore unable to remove the click from the advertiser’s own Web logs. That is, you still get the traffic but you are not charged for it.

What is click fraud?
Yahoo! Search Marketing wants advertisers to understand that traffic quality and click fraud are two very different things. Click fraud is generally considered to be clicks made with bad faith with the sole purpose of generating a charge to the advertiser with zero possibility of a legitimate site visit or transaction occurring. We agree. But from a technical perspective, it is impossible to look into someone’s mind at the time they click to see whether they are clicking with bad faith. In other words, we can’t read users’ minds. Instead, Yahoo! Search Marketing has to look at what identifiable behavior may indicate bad faith. In terms of identifiable behavior, we define click fraud as detected illegitimate bots and certain repetitive clicks. And we have created sophisticated software that identifies this behavior and attempts to filter out charges for these clicks so that you are not billed for them. We do not disclose how we define repetitive clicks or the details about our proprietary technology because we do not want to educate those who are acting in bad faith.
Traffic quality clicks refers to all clicks that are not click fraud, which includes everything from perfectly converting clicks to those that do not convert. It refers to clicks from domestic and international users and clicks from our various distribution channels and products. We realize that advertisers are concerned about traffic quality issues such as receiving traffic from unwanted sources or increased amounts of traffic. While we are not legally obligated to address traffic quality issues, our aspiration is to bring good value to our advertisers. We welcome information from advertisers about traffic quality concerns.

Does Yahoo! Search Marketing monitor the effectiveness of its Click Protection System?
Yes. We don’t assume that our Click Protection System technology is perfect. There will always be people who attempt to find and exploit weaknesses in the software. Therefore, clicks are reviewed after the Click Protection System software has run to identify click fraud. When situations arise in which our specialists discover click patterns that seem to suggest click fraud, we may upgrade the Click Protection System to prevent the billing of such clicks in the future as a goodwill effort to maintain customer satisfaction.

How do I know the Click Protection System is working?
Our Click Protection System software is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result, you may receive clicks for which you are not billed. However, for advertisers to verify the effectiveness of the Click Protection System, they should have a tracking URL specific to Yahoo! Search Marketing in place on all of their ads.
We provide our advertisers with traffic from many sources. This means that an advertiser’s Web logs often show a click or a page view as coming from Yahoo! or one of our distribution partners, which can be confusing. A Yahoo! Search Marketing tracking URL removes the possible source of confusion.

Suppose you are the advertiser who owns the site http://www.joesbagels.com. Your tracking URL would be: http://www.joesbagels.com/?source=yahoo.

With the tracking URL, you are able to review your Web logs for the phrase “source=yahoo.” You will be able to see the targeted traffic that Yahoo! Search Marketing is delivering to you.

If the Click Protection System addresses click fraud, does that mean that all other clicks will convert?
Just as your local shoe store gets customer traffic that is ‘just looking’, so do sites on the Internet. Once a potential customer arrives at an advertiser’s site, it is that advertiser’s challenge to keep that person interested and to provide the right information to close the deal.

Will your Click Protection System detect if my competitor tries to click on my links?
We do not approve of repetitive clicking by competitors on each other’s links. Our Click Protection System is designed to recognize certain repetitive clicks and we work to prevent such click from being charged to our advertisers.

Does your click protection system filter out spiders and robots?
Spiders and robots are instructed not to spider our ads. Our Click Protection System is designed to identify the spiders and robots that violate these instructions.

What can I do if I have questions about the clicks for which I have been charged?
Please contact the Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Solutions department by using the Support Request Form, a link to which is found at upper right-hand corner on nearly all pages in your account. Enter your request and attach any relevant documents before submitting your inquiry. A Customer Solutions representative will review your account and contact you directly.

How does Yahoo! protect me from click fraud?
Yahoo Search Marketing has a very sophisticated Click Protection System that is designed to detect click fraud. We receive billions of searches per month which lead to several million clicks onto ads each day. We strive to ensure that our customers are satisfied with their advertising experience and work to maintain productive and active relationships with advertisers. As part of our effort to maintain advertiser satisfaction, we utilize the Click Protection System, which includes sophisticated software that evaluates each of our advertisers’ clicks.

Our Click Protection System uses search and click data to make both rules-based inferences and pattern recognition-based inferences about which clicks constitute click fraud. While the details cannot be disclosed, the core mechanics involve many data points.

If the data points indicate click fraud, our Click Protection System software marks the identified click in our billing system, and the advertiser is not charged for it. However, the advertiser still receives the click through and we are therefore unable to remove the click from the advertiser’s own Web logs. That is, you still get the traffic but you are not charged for it.

I’ve been concerned with click fraud since the beginning of PPC times. That is probably because I was one of the early victims of click fraud — once with Overture, and again with the early Google AdWords. This was back in 2002 and 2003.

Since then, I haven’t witnessed any serious instance of suspicious traffic coming from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Obviously, that doesn’t mean there’s no problem, far from it. But I honestly thought click fraud was mostly a thing of the past.

Until one morning this summer, when I choked on my toast and nearly died after reading the headline “Click Fraud Rise Or Fall? Click Fraud 22.9% Or 12.7%?”

How could such high percentages of paid clicks possibly be fraudulent? Shouldn’t the FTC be all over this? Well, the FTC doesn’t appear to be involved, and these are the published Q2 2009 results from two competing companies that monitor click fraud activity for a living.

Click Forensics, the more established of the two, says click fraud reached 12.7 percent in Q2 2009. That’s down from 13.8 percent for Q1 2009 and from the 16.2 percent rate reported for Q2 2008. These numbers are high and could be scary to some, but they’re more or less in line with Google’s 10 percent overall invalid click rate.

Yahoo has also said their numbers are in line with Click Forensics. The difference may be explained by the fact that Click Forensics monitors traffic on Google and all other networks, which may not be as “safe” as Google for advertisers.

However, competing firm Anchor Intelligence, says the click fraud rate was actually a whopping 22.9 percent in Q2 2009, up from 21.7 percent in Q1 2009. That’s just really hard to take seriously.

Facebook Accused of Click Fraud

Some advertisers even claim that PPC networks are encouraging, or even creating click fraud to inflate their revenue. For example, in July, Facebook was hit with two lawsuits claiming click fraud on their behalf (i.e., the plaintiffs are accusing Facebook of charging for clicks that never even occurred).

TechCrunch recently published a story on this topic that generated more than 230 comments, many from other advertisers crying foul.

What Google Does to Protect Their Advertisers from Click Fraud

Google is fighting click fraud attempts with technology and brains. All paid clicks go through a three-step system designed to filter out click fraud attempts.

Proactive Filtering:

1. All clicks are sent through algorithmic filters that detect the vast majority of click fraud attempts. Invalid clicks will still be sent to the advertiser’s Web site, but the advertiser won’t see any invalid clicks in their report, and they obviously won’t be asked to pay for them. These aren’t necessarily fraudulent in intent. Most of the time, they’re quite innocent. For example, many visitors double click on links, or click back and trigger the AdWords tracking script a second time.

2. Offline Analysis focuses specifically on clicks that come from the AdSense program. This is done after the fact, and invalid clicks are credited. Google doesn’t specify which clicks were credited, but they provide some information in the Click Quality Adjustments section of your billing summary.

Reactive Filtering

3. Investigations are conducted when advertisers complain that they think they were victims of fraud. This is quite rare, according to Google. They state that less than 0.02 percent of clicks are reactively identified as invalid. In other words, Google claims that only two out of every 10,000 clicks are known to be invalid. And even these are credited back to the advertiser.

According to Google, this filtering process is quite efficient at identifying invalid clicks. While Google doesn’t specify the exact percentage of all invalid clicks, they do say that it fluctuates from month to month, that it’s always less than 10 percent, and that it has been more or less stable since 2002.

Does This Mean Click Fraud on Google AdWords is Only 0.2%?

Not even close. It’s impossible to know what that number is at this time.

Obviously, Google does a lot to counter click fraud. But even so, their process leaves out one important possibility: invalid clicks that aren’t detected proactively by Google’s algorithms, and which aren’t detected by the advertiser. This is obviously impossible to quantify, and arguably could be quite a large percentage of clicks.

On the other hand, third party firms such as Click Forensics and Anchor Intelligence often forget to include the word “attempted” when they speak of click fraud, as in “attempted click fraud.” The word “click fraud” clearly implies that somebody’s getting ripped off.

However, because they aren’t tied in directly with the search engines’ internal systems, they aren’t in a position to know whether the advertiser is being charged for suspicious clicks. Clearly, AdWords advertisers aren’t getting ripped off by 12.7 percent — and definitely not by 22.9 percent.

This all points to the need for further and deeper collaboration between the search engines and third-party firms like Click Forensics to reassure advertisers that their money isn’t spent after bad clicks.

You can see your own invalid click report by building a report with AdWords.

Link to original post: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635015