Click Fraud

I haven't written a lot about my new job, since I've been busy with the ski season etc. But I thought it would be an appropriate time to write once and a while about it.

I wanted to talk about PPC(Pay Per Click) and Click Fraud. I work with Yahoo and Google to pay for ads and I have a substantial amount that I spend on it. So fraud is a big concern. Now my amount compared to some is small, but when you do the math some of the numbers can be astronomical.

Let’s look at some figures. Click Forensics says that click fraud for Q4 was 14.2%, and Shuman from Google believes it is high Shumans Blog. Let’s say Shuman is right and the number is high, lets half it. So 7.1% Click Fraud... If you advertise and spend only $100k that's still $7100 in fraud. My opinion is that too much, and I'm sure everyone would agree. I do believe search engines are doing a better job finding and correcting bad clicks, but I would say they are more in the realm of 1 - 2% vs. 7.1%, so that still $5-6k someone's losing. Now if Click Forensics is right then the numbers balloon up.

"But Google credits you"... They sure do but they don't tell you what clicks were credited etc. I don't blame them, but still I don't know if they simply look at my $.10 clicks and write them off and keep the fraudulent $5.00 clicks... I just don't know, and THAT is the problem. I do not trust them since they police themselves.

Looking at raw data from Click Forensics on my companies logs, I'm seeing a HUGE potential for click fraud. For Google alone on a single account I've seen several thousands of $ in possible exposure, so even getting a portion of that will add up to big returns.

What can people do to reduce their exposure to fraud?
1. Don't advertise on content networks, they'll kill you ever time (yes I know I have adsense on my blog :P )
a. if you choose too, watch your terms that get high clicks and think of removing them
b. look at your logs and look for possible places of high clicks that do not have a lot of page views.
2. Watch your high bids and strip them from your campaign.
3. If you don't want to remove the high bid terms, reduce the amount you want to spend.
4. Look into click forensics; they have a free product that people can use, if you spend a lot give them a call.

That's it for now. Feel free to comment on it, I'd love to hear from others.


Daniel