Blog Maintenance

I am upgrading this blog from the Blogger platform to Wordpress over the next few days.

This will cause interuptions to my normal service over the next few days.

I have decided to migrate for a number of reasons:

• More flexibilty in my system
• Better and wider widget development
• Better comment management
• New and simpler theme.

Rest assured, I will keep the same RSS feed so once I am back online service will resume as normal.

During the transition this blog will still be available at fraudulent-clicks.blogspot.com

Click Sentinel

I  came across a new product in the click fraud product portfolio called Click Sentinel.

It is one of the increasing number "community" click fraud products where data is collated from a number of advertisers to help gauge the real level of click fraud which we cannot get due to the lack of transparency from the search engines.  I talk about this subject at greater length in my post Click Fraud Caring Sharing Few.

Click Sentinel is a javascript implementation of click fraud software.

I have not yet completed my review of the product but first impressions are a good product.

--

(AF) Did you know that the higher the bid costs of yoru keyword, the higher the risk of click fraud.  Use Wordze keyword research tools  to help predict high charge/high risk keywords. 

Who's Clicking Who Please Don't Sue

In noticed the following disclaimer on click fraud software supplier Who's Clicking Who website.  I wonder if they had a visit from a certain search engines attorney?

WhosClickingWho?™ Independent Auditing Service is a tool developed solely to help identify abusers fraudulently clicking on Pay-per-click listings, and in no way implies any abuses by the Pay-per-click Search Engines themselves. We believe legitimate Pay-per-click Service companies are also as keenly interested in preventing fraudulent click activity as their customers are. PPC Audit Inc. makes no assertions as to what constitutes fraudulent click activity. Such determinations are to be made between the PPC search engine user and PPC search engine provider, based on the user's data provided.

--

(AF) Who's Clicking who? provide an excellent click fraud monitoring solution with 30 days free trail, go on sign up they may need help with legal fees :-) 

September Bubble Up

I am bubbling up my favourite posts from September from the depths of my blog to give them a second airing

• Low Quality Clicks as a Form of Passive Demonstration
• Fair Isacc Click Fraud Study
• ClickBot Autopsy
• Pay to Read FaceBook Application
• Mechanics of Click Fraud Software

--

(AF) Using the techniques in Aaron Wall's SEO book, I am gaining positions with Google's organic placement.

Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster

No not really, just trying to drag the fickle Stumblers into this blog post to read about the consequences of their website channel surfing.

For the uninitiated, Stumble Upon is a social networking application where people stumble around the internet as if they were channel surfing in the ad break with the aim of finding new and interesting web sites.  If they like the site they give it a thumbs up or else they give it the dreaded thumbs down.  The social aspect is that the newly stumbled sites can be shared with a group of friends.

It's a great site and it can generate a ton of traffic for blogs such as this, but the problem from a click fraud perspective is the profile of a Stumbler is exactly the same as a paid to read click fraud farm.

What we see on our analytics from a Stumbler is a person landing on our site, spending a fraction of a second before moving on.  If someone is carrying out a click fraud investigation, it is hard work to see past these valid Stumbler profiles and not judge them to be click farms clicking on paid ads and then moving onto the next site to carry on their fraud.

The way to get past this problem is to limit which referrer you are analyzing from.  Stumble Upon is quite clearly the source, drill down on you ppc provider and ignore all Stumble data.  This should help pin point if your are the victim of click fraud.

--

(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks

Advertise with Fraudulent Clicks

Looking to buy ad space on Fraudulent Clicks ?

I run ads above the fold as a 468 x 60 banner, or as 120 x 600 banner in the right hand navigation bar.

Each spot costs $100/month and payment is via Paypal. Your ad will be shown on all pages.

I also participate in the Pay-Per-Post program. Using this system, you can hire me to write a post about a product or service. Although this is a sponsored post, I retain the right to compose my post as I see fit. If your product is flawed, I will write that it is flawed, if it is good, the corresponding post will reflect this. I charge $100 per post. Click on the link below to create an assignment.

Visitors are generally interested in web marketing and in particular click fraud.

If you are interested, please contact me.

Click Fraud's Caring Sharing Few

One of the biggest problems in the monitoring and investigation of click fraud is getting the real figures of the problem.  There is no shared analytic data between advertisers, click fraud software suppliers and the search engines and as a result levels of click fraud differ from 0.02% according to  Google up to 50% from some click fraud software suppliers.

A few shining lights stand out from the crowd.  These organisations are collecting large volumes of data and are creating a transparent and available view of click fraud to the wider advertising audience.

At the head of this field is Click Forensics, Inc. This company publishes the highly acclaimed click fraud index on the back of it's click forensics monitoring solution.  Their software is free to small time advertisers and chargeable to larger corporations.  The most important part of the process is that the data is captured centrally and analytical research is done on a large data set.  The result of their investigations are published quarterly as the Click Fraud Index.  The last reported CFI was at 15.8%

Click Forensics are fearless in their pursuit of transparency and their CEO Tom Cuthbert is in constant gladiatorial combat with Shuman Ghosemajumder   Google's invalid click Czar ( some call him the click fraud MIB, covering up all traces of indiscretion).  They joust on the real level of click fraud.  Google doubts the validity of Click Forensics data gathering technique and in return they question Google level of transparency.

Click forensics is not the only player in this arena, and these groups are not providing these services for  altruistic reasons, they are either trying to sell click fraud software to advertisers or are attempting to sell the data collected to the paid placement companies such as the search engines.

I would  advocate that all advertisers participate in some sort of data sharing scheme, in a previous post Fair Isaccs were recruiting advertisers to share their data under tight non-disclosure agreements if you would like details on how to participate in their study please contact me.

--

(AF) The most important resource I use for my search engine optimisation work is Aaron Wall's excellent SEOBook.