Combating Click Fraud E-Document

I have recently come across an interesting e-document called (AF) Combating Click Fraud. It is written by IncreMental Advantage and has contributions from some of the major players in the click fraud arena.

The publishers review is shown below:

While its origins go back to the late 1990’s, its only over the past few years that “click-fraud” has come to the forefront and become a topic of concern for advertisers, web publishers, and search engines alike. IncreMental Advantage estimates that click fraud cost Internet advertisers close to $ 700 million in 2006. Click fraud has become so pervasive that it has begun to significantly stunt the growth of Internet advertising. Given the global reach of the internet and e-commerce, the issue is not isolated to the United States. And while there are many differing views on the severity of the issue, no one can deny its existence. Among the issues addressed in this report are: • Competitors committing click fraud • Keyword manipulation including jamming, gap surfing, and friendly URLs • Clickbots and click farms • Domain tasting • Click fraud arbitrage • Litigation against click fraudsters • Technological solutions This report features interviews with senior executives of companies offering technological solutions and financial alternatives as a means to combat click fraud. These include:

• Fair Isaacs Corporation
• Authenticlick • ClickLab, LLC
• Think Partnership
• MordComm, Inc. /AdWatcher
• ClickDefense Inc.
• ClickFacts Inc.
• IonReport, LLC

The e-document is available for download from amazon.

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(AF) My list of Click Fraud Books My Amazon aStore

Getting a Click Fraud Refund from Your PPC Provider

In this post I discuss the mechanics of obtaining a refund from the three main search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft if you suspect you are the subject of invalid clicks.

The first stage of your click fraud reparation process is to gather the appropriate evidence of a click fraud attack. The more detail you have, the more likely that your supplier will give a refund.

I have developed an MS word template for evidence gathering, please leave a comment on this post and I will e-mail a copy.

The information required is:

• A brief description of why you think you have been the subject of click fraud
• Date and time of attack
• IP addresses of problem hosts
• Campaign details
• How much refund you think you are entitled to

Once the evidence has been gathered it needs to be submitted the the search engine

Google

The Big G has a special on-line form to complete to request an investigation.

They request much of the information already mentioned above, but without the value of the suspected fraud. I would advise completing my form and sending this to the Google operative who contacts you during the subsequent inquiry.

Yahoo

The second placed search engine has a special name for a click fraud investigation and that is a "Click Investigation". To obtain start an investigation, go to your search marketing account and click on customer support link at the top of the page.

Set the type of inquiry as click protection and the subject line to "click investigation request" supply the following information

• The date(s) of the click activity within the last 60 days you would like investigated
• The specific keyword(s) associated with the clicks.
• Use the "Attachment" tab if you want to upload a screenshot or additional information, including your weblogs.

The new traffic quality centre has a very concise section on applying for click fraud reparation including an SLA for response times to your request.

Microsoft

The Microsoft Adcenter does not have a dedicated method for initiating a click fraud investigation, rather you are directed to the central customer support function.

If you need personal assistance and can't find your answer in Help, we invite you to phone (800) 518-5689 or submit an e-mail request at the Customer Support e-mail website.

Microsoft AdCenter Customer Support is available 7 days a week from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time in the United States.

They do not state what information is required so It is advisable to collect the data mentioned above

I hope that helps in the first stage of initiating an investigation. The next post in this series will discuss what to do if your provider says no to your reparation request.

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(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard

Click Fraud Monitor - August 2007

In this monthly recurring post, I plot create a table of click fraud percentages from various sources.

I do this because the rate of reported click fraud varies hugely from source to source.  At the bottom end, the search engines claim very low levels of click fraud and at the opposing end, suppliers of click fraud services use scare mongering tactics to state click fraud is at artificially high levels.

From this I produce a very unscientific statistical analysis and calculate the average of these percentages.  The aim of this analysis is to balance the hype from both ends of the spectrum, and over time hopefully this will give a trend of "claims".  Will it go up or down, I will be interested to find out.

If there are any sources I have missed please leave a comment and they will be included in future monitors.

Organisation	% Click Fraud Aug 2007
Google	0.02%
Fraudulent Clicks	3.9%
Yahoo	12%
MSN	no data found
Click Fraud Network	15.8%
Adwatcher	20%
Click Tracks	20%
Who's Clicking Who	50%

 

Augusts Click Fraud Monitor Average: 11.95%

Sources

I include a link to all sources I use to calculate the rate

Google

Yahoo

Click Fraud Network

AdWatcher (af)

Click Tracks (af)

Who's Clicking Who (af)

Fraudulent Clicks - I include my own measurements  from my adwords invalid clicks report and details of invalid clicks from click fraud software running against my accounts.

Time Zone Targeting to Exclude the Click Fraudster

In a previous post I discussed Geo-Targeting to exclude potential click fraud, in this post I expand upon that to add time zone targeting to exclude potential low quality clicks.

If the majority of your potential customers live and work in particular time zone, target your ads to only be shown during key times in that zone.

An example of this would be a UK company selling a B2B service.  The best time to target potential customers who will give real value to your campaign is during office hours, Monday to Friday.  So in this example, it would be prudent to only run the ads GMT 09:00 - 17:00.

This combats click fraud by presenting as small a time frame as possible to the click farms and click bots.  This does not of course exclude manual clicks from competitors in the same time zone.

Over and above click fraud, this method of time targeting also helps to improve the click quality and hopefully your conversion rate.

This method is not a cure for click fraud, but it should (to expand the metaphor) be one of the drugs in your medicine cabinet.

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(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard

Google's Chief Finance Officer to Resign

George Reyes is to resign after five years and a half years with the search Giant.

Mr Reyes succsessfully brought Google through it's typically innovative IPO. For readers looking for the click fraud angle, he was the Google exec who famously said that the click fraud problem may kill off the current search engine business model.

"I think something has to be done about this (click fraud) really, really
quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model,"

There has been no comment on what he plans to do in the future.

The complete press release is available on the Google press site
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(AF) Search engine optimisation information SEOBook

Click Fraud 101

Here are a list of my posts designed to be the beginners guide to click fraud.

• Click Fraud - Definition
• Click Fraud - Detection
• Click Fraud - Reparation
• The Click fraud to do list

As I add posts, so this list will be updated, please syndicate this site for future updates.

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Contact Me to Monitor your campaign against click fraud

Yahoo Create Traffic Quality Centre

In a similar move to Google, Yahoo has create a click fraud resource which they call the Traffic Quality Center

My first impression is that this is a comprehensive tools for Yahoo advertisers.

More soon ...

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(AF) Click fraud software from Who's Clicking Who

Trust Me I'm A Search Engine

As I have mentioned in the click fraud paradox, search engines do not inform advertisers which clicks are invalid in case their detection methods are hacked. All automatic click fraud reparation is done on a trust basis. They do not charge x% because they have detected these clicks to be invalid, and we have to trust their detection methods and that the other percentage is truly billable.

Let me don my cynical hat for the moment and say "No I don't trust you. Your money is made through clicks on adverts, you bottom line relies on the largest number of clicks possible. You want to cover up the invalid clicks problem."

Flip back to my optimistic fedora and cock it at a jaunty angle I reply "It is not in the interest of the search engines to hide the invalid click issue. Our advertising spend is based upon trust and once that trust is lost, our money will be taken elsewhere."

Cynical hat (it's an authoritarian black leather number by the way) "They know we will go elsewhere, that's why they cover their tracks"

Optimistic (green with a black silk band) "We need to trust them."

Trust is the central tenant of our relationship with the search engines, and their lack of transparency on which click is invalid causes a problem. We need a mechanism with which to gain trust.

I find myself repeatedly saying we need independent verification. In the same way that auditors check computer system controls for stock holders of public companies, I would like to see auditors check the controls of search engine invalid click processes.

I do not expect them to publish how it is done, only that it works well. This should be an on-going process.

So this is a call to the search engines, engage the services of the big four accountancy firms and have them audit the processes on the advertisers behalf.

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(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks

Click Fraud Haiku Game

Submit your click fraud Haiku as a comment to this post, the standard haiku format is a triplet of lines containing five, seven, and five syllables per respective line.

I am offering the company or individual with the best haiku twelve months free click fraud montitoring. This prize has a value of £1,200 (British Pounds).

Here is my effort

The click was not real
botnet targets my keyword
reparation now

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(AF) Click fraud software from Adwatcher

The Click Fraud Paradox

"I cannot tell you which click is an invalid click because you can work out how to create invalid clicks." Said the search engine.

"So how do I know you are detecting all the clicks?" replied the advertiser.

"Trust me I'm a search engine."

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(AF) Search engine optimisation information SEOBook

Click Fraud Software Reviews

There I was, busy researching and preparing the most in-depth analysis of all the click fraud software on the market and then I stumbled across this site where someone has done all the hard work for me.

www.adtrackerreviews.com

It's an excellent piece of work, very much along the lines of what I was doing, not that I am bitter about being pipped at the post (grumble grumble).

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(AF) Search Engine Magazine Search Marketing Standard

Click Fraud A-Listers

In this post, I take a leaf from Hollywood's book and name the people whom I think are A-Listers in the world of click fraud.

The Hollywood A list if the roster of the most bankable film stars, a 100 point check list was developed by journalist James Ulmer,

I am opening this post up to comments to expand this list and create a who' s who in click fraud so please let me know who should be added.

In at number one

Shuman Ghosemajumder

The Googleite and member of the Click Quality Team. Whenever Google want to talk with authority about click fraud (I know I keep calling it CF when they call it invalid clicks )they seem to roll out Shuman.

And at number two only because it is the second place search engine

Reggie Davis

Reggie is Yahoo's click fraud Czar, not as vocal in the blogsphere as Shuman, but Reggie has been tasked at an executive level to combat click fraud.

Neil Matthews

Sterling chap writes an excellent blog (will quite probably drop out of the top ten in the very very near future). He it witty intelligent and attractive to women of all ages.

Please leave your comments so we can make up a top ten.

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(AF) My list of Click Fraud Books My aStore

Operation Bot Roast

No this is not the latest title of a XXX rated DVD, this is an official FBI operation to crack down on 'bot related cyber crime.

Robot or bot nets are collections of hundreds or even tens of thousands of computers infected with a virus which allows the "bot herder" or perpetrator of the attack to run programs which attack other machines on the Internet. These programs typically attempt to do the following:

• Steal the computer owner’s identity;
• Launch massive spam campaigns;
• Engage in click-fraud—schemes which artificially inflate the number of visitors to a website; and
• Launch denial of service attacks that can cripple web servers and crash sites.

The owner of the infected machine is typically unaware that their machine is under the control of the "bot herder". It is therefore critical that end users take PC security very seriously. Anti virus software should be updated and OS patches such as those automatically sent out by Microsoft should be applied.

In the wider world of click fraud, bot net attacks can be very difficult to counter against. How does a system identify a single bot net click, which then stays on a page as if reading details against a real person clicking through and reading the contents of an e-commerce site? Expand this to tens of thousands of IP addresses and we get the very real threat of click fraud.

Details of the operation are available on the official FBI website.

"Hey Scully want to check out my bot?"

"Put that away Mulder!"

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(AF) My list of Click Fraud Books My aStore

Click Quality Council

And lo the white council did meet and Elrond ordered that before them they be presented the ring of the enemy..

No, not that kind of council, but a click quality council has been formed of eminent members of the click fraud community and it has agreed upon an eight point action plan:

Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.

Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.

Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.

Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.

Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.

Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.

Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.

Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

Further details of their work including an interesting videocast can be seen at click quality council

This commentator cannot agree more with the seventh point, the sooner third part auditing of invalid clicks is introduced the better. Search engines are refusing to be transparent to their customers, so companies such as the big four accountancy firms should be sent in to test, but not diverge the methods of invalid click detection and reparation.

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Contact Me to Monitor your campaign against click fraud

Geotargeting to Beat the Click Fraudster

A simple yet effective way to cut down on click fraud is to restrict access to your on-line ads to the countries which commit the most click fraud.

At first this may sound like a poor idea, restricting your potential advertising audience, but as most of the people recruited to pay to click schemes are in low income areas in the developing world, it is unlikely that these countries will supply a large number of your potential customers.

So a quick how to:

Review the analytics of your site, to see where your clicks are coming from.

Review where the majority of your business comes from.

Hey presto match the two together and exclude the countries which are not generating business and are the potential source of click fraud

The Click Fraud Network produce an excellent heat map to graphically shown the largest sources of click fraud originate. This resource can be used as a tool in your geo-targeting.

(heatmap courtesy click fraud network)

Even if you are not a subject of click fraud, reducing access to your ads to countries which are not producing quality click through is a best practice in optimising your campaigns.

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

Google have created a new resource centre for click quality.

Click quality is the Google euphemism for controlling click fraud (okay okay invalid clicks) and although there does not appear to be any new technical resources on the site, the overview makes very interesting reading for anyone interested in how Google's various layers of click fraud detection work.

The introduction from the site reads:

About the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
The relationship between
Google and AdWords advertisers is built on trust. Advertisers rely on the
relevance of our ad placement, our reporting statistics, and the quality of the
clicks their ads receive. We take this trust seriously, and we know that AdWords
couldn't exist without it.
In order to stay abreast of your concerns, we
constantly speak with advertisers and keep a close eye on online advertising
journals and blogs. We've seen that many of you have questions about click fraud
and the impact it might have on your AdWords accounts. In particular, we've
heard your concerns about 'click farms' and the quality of clicks received on
the content network. To help address these and related issues, we've created
this website to aggregate various resources on click fraud.
We hope that you
find this resource center useful. We're still working on expanding the website
and are eager to incorporate your feedback. Feel free to pass along
your suggestions on how it could better suit your needs.

Google's Click Quality Mission Statement

The mission of Google's click quality team, the group of individuals tasked with developing antidotes for and responding to click fraud have revealed their mission statement.

The mission states:

Protect Google's advertising network and provide excellent customer service to clients. We do that by:

• Vigilantly monitoring invalid clicks/impressions and removing its source
• Reviewing all client requests and responding in a timely manner
• Developing and improving systems that remove invalid clicks.impressions and properly credit clients for invalid traffic
• Educating clients and employees on invalid clicks/impressions.

If this commentator could add another item to the mission it would be

"Report transparently to clients on invalid clicks"

Extracted from the Tuzhilin Report.

(AF) Search Marketing Standard - Subscribe Now!

Search Engine Marketing Magazine

I recently came across a new publication called Search Marketing Standard Magazine(af). This is a traditional print publication specialising in search engine marketing topics including:

• Pay-per-click advertising: keyword selection, click fraud, local search, etc.
• Search engine optimization: ranking, web directories, SEO strategies, onsite optimization, visitor statistics.

To my knowledge this is the first print publication for search engine marketing (please comment on this post if you know of others) and to me this marks a level of maturity that the profession of search engine marketing has gained.

The magazine is published quarterly by Boris Mordkovich and subscription is available on-line for a very reasonable $20 for one year.

Adwords Click Fraud - Reparation

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part three is how to notify Google, attempt to gain reparation and stop the continued abuse of your ads.

Once you have ascertained that you have a suspected click fraud problem, you need to do two things. Notify Google and then exclude the problem IP addresses.

Google have an on-line form to complete. Their invalid click team will then launch an investigation. The form requests details of the campaign, keywords, details of IP addresses and other information which makes the campaign owner suspicious of click fraud.

Once this has been completed Google will then launch their investigation. Here lies the rub. The investigation is not transparent and companies can not be assured that they will obtain a refund. Techniques for increasing your chance of a refund will be discussed in a later posts.

Once domains committing click fraud against your ad campaign have been identified, it is the best practice to exclude them from accessing your site in future.

From the Adwords campaign manager in the tools section there is a tool called IP exclusion tool. Enter the detected IP addresses and your ads will not be shown to the click fraudsters.
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(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks

Click Fraud Rises for 4th Consecutive Quarter

Click Fraud as a percentage of total pay per click activity rose to 15.8% according to invalid click monitoring body Click Fraud Network. This is a rise on click fraud for the 4th consecutive quarter.

According to the report, the key findings for Q2 of 2007 were:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
* The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent. That’s up from 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
* Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 and contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates.
* In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (5.1 percent), China (3.2 percent) and Australia (3 percent).

The Click Fraud Network collects anonimised data via it's monitoring product Click Forensics. This product works by inserting tracking code into web pages and reporting back to a central server in much the same way as Google Analytics. This service is free to advertisers who have less than 100,000 paid clicks per month, and chargeable for larger users.

Full detail of the report are available on the Click Fraud Network

Adwords Click Fraud - Detection

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part two is how to detect click fraud.

In short you should suspect click fraud activity if you see a marked increase in clicks but no increase in conversions as a result.

This is a fairly general statement, and needs to be qualified. There may be a legitimate increase in clicks due to the following:

Competitor Activity
Your competition may have stopped running their ads on similar keywords and your campaign and you are picking up their clicks.

Google Network
If your ad has recently been approved to run on the network as a whole over and above search results, you may see an increase in low quality clicks. A second reason for an increase would be if your ad starts running on a high volume site.

Seasonal Changes
If your site sells seasonal products or services, then click through rate will increase at your busy time of the year.

Budget Chnages
If you increase your max cpc or max daily budget then there will be a corresponding increase in traffic. This may not

Ad Relevancy
If you have recently changed your keywords and they have become too general, the corresponding increase in traffic will probably be of low quality and will not generate conversions.

If you can rule out the above items, then it is probably time to accept you have a problem and begin an investigation.

Review your web logs, are your receiving multiple clicks from one IP address. Again this must come with a caveat, certain ISPs mask the real IP addresses of users behind a single address.

Run an account level or campaign level report for invalid clicks and trend this over a few months. Has Google spotted and not charged you for an increasing amount of invalid clicks.

If the answer to the above two areas are yes, then it is time to report this to Google for reparation. This will be covered in the next post.


It should also be added that there are companies supplying a more proactive approach to click fraud detection.

{BLATANT SELF PUBLICITY WARNING}

Our consultancy service provides a click fraud monitoring service which monitors trends and can even automatically notify your PPC provider that reparation is required. For a no obligation discussion about our services and our flat monthly fees contact us.

Click Fraud To-Do List

If you are a pay per click campaign manager, then I would like to ask you to one thing today; run an invalid click report from your Adwords account.

As part of their move to be more transparent Google added this additional metric to campaign and account level reports and it is surprising how many people are not taking advantage of this information.

A quick how to:

Login to your Adwords account and go to the report section. Select campaign or account reports, and select the invalid click check box, run your report as normal.

The result was quite a shock to me, for the small period I selected, there were a total of 324 clicks with the invalid clicks result at 24. This means that a little over 7% of my clicks are invalid.

Please note, these are only the invalid clicks that the Google tools pick up, and since Google keeps their click fraud monitoring techniques a secret we do not know what else may slip through the net.

I am interested to get a view of other peoples click fraud percentage, for those of you who run the report, please post your percentages as comments to this post.

Adwords Click Fraud - Definition

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part one is a definition of click fraud.

In short click fraud is the nefarious clicking on Adwords ads in an effort to gain an advantage other than that specified by the Advertiser.

Click fraud comes in two main types, clicks to increase a content publishers revenue and clicks by competitors to impact on a company's Adwords budget.

Fraudulent clicks to increase a publishers revenue is when a company or individual is using the Adsense program to monetise their web site content. Using this programme, Google display relevant ads on the website and pay the owner when someone clicks on the ads or in the case of cost per impression for a certain number of visits to the site to display an ad.

The fraud occurs when the owner clicks on links displayed on their site to increase the revenue generated. These clicks may be manual or automatic via a ClickBot (discussed later).

Competitor fraud is when companies or individuals click on the ads of companies competing on the same keywords as themselves in an effort to drive up their advertisig costs or to exhaust the competitions daily adword budget so they can then display their own competing messages to sell the same or similar products.

Click-bots are the way that organised click fraud is committed. The bot is a piece of computer code which is programed to click on a particular ad over and over again automatically.

Should advertisers be afraid of click fraud? Yes they should, it is thought to be one of the main concerns for Google about their future and there are reports of large numbers of hijacked computers which can act as a network of Clickbots launching sustained attacks. These are being employed by organised crime gangs so the report says.

In the next post in this series I will discuss how to detect if your ads are the subject of click fraud.

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(AF) Click fraud software from Who's Clicking Who

Re-Branding Exercise

I mentioned in a previous entry that Matthews Middleware Consulting is not an appropriate name for what I do anymore, and that I would be re-branding after my companies financial year end.

Well July 31st was year end, and the process to become Fraudulent-Clicks.com is underway.

I have decided to focus on click fraud or invalid clicks as Google call this increasing area of concern.

The blog entries will focus on click fraud and my click fraud investigation and reparation consultancy service has been launched.

Existing Adwords clients should not be concerned as all contracted engagements will be carried out to the full.
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Is your business a victim of click? Contact me for details of my investigation and reparation service.