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PPC ClickFraud: It's a Bigger Problem then You Think
By Merle (http://MCpromotionsPress.com)

Pay-per-click search engine advertising is one of the most
popular ways to promote a website. With Overture and Google
leading the pack, the industry as a whole has grown immensely
in the past few years. According to a report by
PriceWaterHouseCoopers, they estimate that Internet Advertising
brought in more than $9 billion in 2004 alone.

With PPC advertising you choose "keywords/phrases," then bid how
much you'd like to pay for each click. When a searcher goes to a
search engine and types in one of your keyphrases, your short
text ad appears, and if they click on it your account is then
charged. In a "perfect world" this is the way it would work, but
thanks to unscrupulous people, there's a dirty little secret known
as "click fraud."

Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct
purpose of costing the advertiser money. It's similar to paying
out cash for false leads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of
those who responded to a survey conducted by the "Search Engine
Professional Organization" had stated that fraud is a problem
when it comes to PPC advertising.

So where does click fraud come from? Well, there are actually a
few different sources:

1) AdSense Users: Google has a program called "Adsense" that
pays website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates
them per click. Google does monitor this and it's against their
terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site.
If they find publishers doing this, they will lose their
accounts, but some may still be clicking under the radar.

2) Your Competitors: Your competitors could be clicking on your
ads over a period of several days in order to deplete your ad
budget.

3) Software: There are those who use automated clicking tools,
such as robot programs, to click on PPC listings.

In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC
ads for hours. Many don't know why they do it, and don't care,
only that they'll be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do
a search on any search engine you'll see plenty of sites looking
to hire people for just this purpose. For more on this see...
http://tinyurl.com/2ka5g

Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against
click fraud. Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including
IP addresses, browser info, users' session info and what they
call "pattern recognition." They have a "proprietary system" in
place for detecting fraud and a specialized team that monitors
things and works with the advertisers to stop it.

Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud, such as
"using negative keywords" to keep your ads from showing up for
products and services that are unrelated. They also suggest
adding tracking url's to your links so you can track the traffic
coming from Google. An easy way to do this is to add a ? to your
links along with the identifier. For example, a tracking link to
identify Google would look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?referer-google

If you go through your log files, you'll be able to see your
Google traffic at a glance.

If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right
away, as they have a team of researchers that will investigate.
They also take action to block future impressions from anyone
they identify as committing click fraud. Like Overture, they
also have "proprietary technology" that distinguishes between
normal clicks and invalid ones. Google never bills you for any
"bad clicks" that are caught by their system.

So what's an honest website owner to do? You need to be alert
to any "suspicious activity" by researching your server logs
or stats. If you're experiencing a lot of clicks and no sales
you'll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for
any spikes in traffic, usually on one keyword or phrase and
coming from only one PPC source. You need to measure and track
all of your PPC accounts closely.

If this sounds like too much work, you may want to look at an
outside service to take care of it for you. A variety of new
services have opened recently to help combat the click fraud
problem.

1) Keyword Max: http://www.KeyWordMax.com

Offers up a service called "Click Auditor," which monitors the
activity on your PPC accounts and alerts you to any suspicious
activity. You can request a free demo at the site.

2) Click Detective: http://www.clickdetective.com/

A website monitoring service that uses sophisticated tracking
mechanisms to determine whether "visitor behavior" is normal or
not. Offering a 15 day free trial. Easy to use, you just copy
and paste a snippet of code on your page and add a campaign ID
by logging into your account.

3) Click Assurance: http://ClickAssurance.com

An Internet Security Firm that specializes in click fraud. They
will audit your PPC accounts and go after any refunds you are
due because of fraud.

4) Who's Clicking Who: http://WhosClickingWho.com

An independent auditing service that tracks individual users for
fraud. Can also detect abuse coming from proxy servers. A one
month subscription is $79.00, which includes free installation
and up to 50,000 transactions per month.

5) ClickLab: http://ClickLab.com/products/click-fraud

This service isolates bad clicks with a scorecard based detection
system. Pricing starts at $50.00 per month and is based on the
number of sites you need to track and their page views.

ClickLab also has a nice white paper you should download while
visiting: "How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud."
http://www.clicklab.com/d/resources

Click fraud isn't going away anytime soon. If anything, it will
probably get worse before it get's any better. It's up to you as
a vigilant website owner to do what you can to keep your PPC
advertising costs down. You can't stop it, but with the right
tracking in place, it can be managed and controlled, and
hopefully kept to a minimum.

================================================================
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