I am bubbling up my favourite posts from September from the depths of my blog to give them a second airing
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(AF) Using the techniques in Aaron Wall's SEO book, I am gaining positions with Google's organic placement.
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.
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(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks
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.
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(AF) The most important resource I use for my search engine optimisation work is Aaron Wall's excellent SEOBook.
This post discusses the three main methods used by click fraud monitoring software to ensure your pay per click campaign is free from fraud. It also discusses the requirements to retrofit each method into your existing ads.
JavaScript
This method requires a small piece of javascript code to be added to the landing page of your website. This javascript then reports back to a central server when a click through from a PPC ad is made. The server is hosted either internally or externally by a click fraud service provider. Increasingly companies are selecting hosted options to reduce complexity.
This method require very little change to the actual pay per click campaign. Editing the landing page of the campaign and adding javascript code will take very little time.
Some service collect keyword data and require a change to the ads as well. This is in the form of adding a keyword tracking tag. An example of this would be on Google Adwords, the landing page would need to be changed from
www.landingpage.com/product.html
to
www.landingpage.com/product.html?kw={keyword}
The amount of time to implement this type of change will increase depending upon the number of ads your company is running.
Re-direction
The second method of data capture is via redirection.
The landing page of the advertisement needs to be changed to point to a gateway server. Once a user has clicked through on an ad, they are briefly sent to the gateway server where the pertinent data is collected. The user is then seamlessly redirected to the real target page.
This method required more retrofitting for existing campaigns as every landing page needs to be changed to point to the new gateway servers.
Log File Analysis
The last method I will discuss is log file analysis. Using this technique, web server log file are imported into an analysis program and analytical analysis of the log is made searching for tell tale patterns in the data.
Some system provide an automatic upload of the log files via ftp every 15 minutes or so to provide near-line analysis and reporting of problems. I am not aware of a product which supplies real time analysis via this method.
This method requires no changes to campaigns as analysis is based entirely on raw log data.
In a future post I will discuss my preferred method of evaluating and choosing a click fraud monitor
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(af) Who's Watching Who uses javascript on the landing page method.
(af) Adwatcher is an example of redirection
(af) Click Tracks uses log file analysis
Whilst Browsing though Facebook applications today, I came across one which looks remarkably like a pay to read scheme.
Cash Cliques as it is know, asks people to click on websites, stay on the site for 30 seconds and then move onto the next one. In return a small trickle income is sent to the clicker via Paypal.
The sales copy for the application states:
By simply adding this application you can earn $ for clicking on websites, you don't even have to look at the website just wait 30 seconds and click on the next and get paid for everyone you click on!
We're not talking $Millions but a couple of extra quid a week for simply being on Facebook is better than nothing!
You can be paid by PayPal or cheque so you don't have to worry about revealing your bank details!
If you don't like it you can remove the application at any time, like any Facebook application! But UNlike other Facebook applications, this one can make you REAL money!
Good Luck!
In a pay per read scheme, the user will usually click through on a pay per click link, costing advertisers money, the clicker then pauses to simulate a real person reading content on a website before moving on.
The people who benefit are content providers taking a share of the ad revenue from systems such as Adsense or competitors trying to deplete the daily marketing budget of another company.
I would recommend that no-one signs up for application of this sort as they are just another manifestation of click fraud.
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((AF) Free trial of Web Analytic software ClickTracks
A quick post to raise a rye smile, I was submitting my usual monthly click fraud report and it is too big for the Google system to handle and it was rejected, there is just too much fraudulent activity from the content network this month.
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(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard
I was fortunate enough to be given a guest blogging spot on Seo Scoop, where Dazzlin Donna let me write a post about ClickBot.A.
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(AF) Pay Per Click Campaign Analytics from Click Tracks
BlogRush a new blog syndication service has just opened it's doors and already nefarious users have found a loop hole and are using impression fraud techniques to generate traffic to made for ads sites. MFA sites are suspected to be creating a large portion of click fraud on the content networks.
Blogrush is a reciprocal advertising platform for bloggers. For every load of my blog pages, the feed of other burners is displayed on the widget (check out the widget to the right of my posts), this in turn allows my feed to be shown on other bloggers BlogRush. This reciprocal advertising should hopefully generate traffic.
BlogRush have been forced to manually vet every new blog in the hope of sifting out low quality MFA sites. Let hope the manipulative few will not spoil what looks like a quality blogging tool.
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(AF) Search engine optimisation information SEOBook
A new term has come onto my personal radar and that is impression fraud. I would like to define this term for readers of this blog.
Impression fraud is a close relative of click fraud, but instead of effecting pay per click advertising budgets, it is effecting advertisers who use pay per impression or CPM as it is also know.
CPM is an abbreviation for cost per thousand impressions where M stands for the Latin term for one thousand. The abbreviation is a throw back to print advertising where the term meant cost per thousands of homes the publication would reach.
In a Google Adwords context it relates to site targeted advertising where you will pay a set amount for one thousand impressions of your ads on a site or type of site your select during ad creation, as opposed to pay per click advertising when an advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked upon.
CPM ads can be text ads, image ads or click to play video ads, and they are generally used when a company is trying to build brand awareness. An example of this could be a car company who has released a new model and they want to pay for repeated image ads to be displayed on a leading car review site which runs adsense advertising.
With impression fraud, content publishers are generating repeated reloads of their website in an effort to increase impressions and thereby generate revenue.
There are doubts whether impression fraud gets past many of the filters used by the search engines.
I hope that helps define impression fraud for you.
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(AF) Pay Per Click Campaign Analytics from Click Tracks
Google has estimated that invalid clicks cost them $100 million in lost sales per percentage point, they go onto say that the invalid click rate they are seeing is 10%. This equates to a staggering $1 billion in lost revenue.
In an interview for Forbes Shuman Ghosemajumder Google's manager for trust and safety said:
Our invalid clicks rate — the activity rate — has remained in the range of less than 10 percent of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million [U.S.] per year in potential revenue foregone
This figure is comprised of all the clicks that Google's filters intercept and mark as invalid, this type of click will include actual click fraud from bots etc along with things such as reloads which count as a double click.
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(AF) Click fraud software from Who's Clicking Who
I have been the recipient of a barrage of invalid clicks, what is more I know exactly who has committed this indiscretion; Google.
My click fraud monitoring software has detected a large number of click emanating from an IP address in Mountain View California.
These clicks are over a number of keywords from and via and unknown user agent i.e. it is not a browser and the clicks seemed to display and automated pattern in that they happened very quickly with a very small time on the site.
A quick check of the whois records shows the IP address belongs to one of Google's servers. I am 100% sure that the the clicks are a system check by the Adwords program and the Google filtering system will mark the clicks as invalid but I intend to submit an invalid click investigation report to Google and ask them to confirm that clicks emanating from inside of the company are not credited to my account as true clicks.
The complete lack of visibility of the filtering process, a necessary evil to protect the integrity of the process from abuse, leaves advertisers in a predicament where the phrase trust me I'm a search engine rings true and we have to assume nothing is getting though the search engine filters.
I already have my headline ready for tabloid publication if it turns out I have paid for these clicks
"Google Gazumps Genuine Growth"
I will report back on the post in a future post.
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Contact Me to Monitor your campaign against click fraud
I run a monetised blog as you can no doubt see, and another form of click fraud that occurs is the failure to record clicks emanating from publisher sites back to an advertisers site.
I am NOT suggesting any of the advertisers I publish on my blog are anything but 100% honest, they have been specifically chosen to match the niche I write about, but in the wild west that is the Internet there are operators whom are less that scrupulous about recording clicks.
Why I classify this as click fraud is that the failure to register a click which results in a sale is denying publishers their legitimate commission for generating traffic and sending to the advertiser.
The solution to this problem is to use some sort of system which records the click before redirecting the link to it's correct location. This can be written in-house or a 3rd party product can be bought. This is the method used by the big third part affiliate programs such as TradeDoubler. I have the benefit of a personal click fraud system (see my consultancy service) which also acts as a affiliate tracking service, but this not fool proof, it only captures the data from the point of click and does not verify the conversion unless the advertiser is kind enough to implement some conversion java script code on the conversion page.
This is exactly the same problem that the search engines have, there is no complete set of data from the click on the ad to the conversion thank you page.
This lack of transparency is an issue across many areas of internet commerce.
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Below is an example of an affiliate link which redirect through my ad monitoring software and records the click.
(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard
Acclaimed SEO consultant and author of the best selling e-book SEO Book claims that
"Click fraud is a huge issue"
In his e-book he talks about filtering out sites which are creating low quality click from the Google content network. This is an extremely effective way to block fraudulent clicks by restricting which sites publish your ads by monitoring for IP addresses which repeatedly click but generate no value. A word of caution is that man ISP hide their users behind one IP address, so you may be restricting all of AOL when it is only one user from that network.
His seminal work on SEO which is constantly update as SEO techniques evolve can be downloaded from the authors own website (af) SEOBook.
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Contact Me to Monitor your campaign against click fraud
I was musing the other day on whether click fraud or invalid clicks could ever be a good thing. This lead me to the concept of using invalid clicks to demonstrate against evil corporations by effecting their bottom line.
Here is the scenario I envisaged. My evil corporation, lets call them MegaBad Things Corp has invented a new anti ageing cream for sale only to the wives of mega wealthy Oligarchs, the terrible thing is that they make the cream by squashing cute ickle kittens into a gooey mess whilst they are still alive, to make things worse the machine operators laughs (he has to laugh, it is in the corporate squashing manual) and twirls his evil waxed moustache.
I'm outraged, I must take action , here is my plan:
I am complaining about your kittie squashing actions. I have done this by effecting your bottom line via your pay per click budget. I have clicked on a link without any intention of buying your products. This is eating up your daily budget and reducing sales.
Please stop squashing kitties, I will continue to perform this act until you stop your actions.
MegaBad Things is an evil corporation and they are not about to lie down and take this type of cr*p from a bunch of liberal and probably poor cat lovers, so they approach the search engine and demand a refund. Are these click fraudulent? I don't think they are, they are very low quality to be sure, but the company has invited people to find their website by typing in the particular keywords. Just because they don't buy "Hag to Fab" does not mean the process is fraud.
It could work, but I am prepared to bet that as soon as MegaBad Things Corp e-mails their analytics showing a trail from a keyword to the investor relation page the search engines will cave and issue a refund. They know who pays the bills.
Keep on fighting the powers brothers and sisters.
I was very fortunate to have a discussion with Joseph Milana from the research department of Fair Isaac on a click fraud study they are currently running.
Fair Isaac is a company which supplies business intelligence product across a wide range of business sectors, the product they are most well know for is Falcon Fraud Manager which protects 20 of the worlds top 25 financial institutions against credit and debit card fraud.
Fair Isaac's core competency is the analysis of large data sets, the data mining they do gives them the ability to do deep statistical analysis looking for patterns which appear pathological. Using their knowledge and techniques to spot fraud in the credit card arena, the are performing a study into click fraud.
Fair Isaac have issued a call to the broader ppc advertising community to supply data with which they can complete a very detailed analysis of click fraud in an attempt to ascertain if there is a real problem. I have agreed to help them collect this type of data through a call to action of this blogs readership to supply data for their study.
They require the following atomic level data and most saliently, after click information i.e. did the click convert The items marked in bold are required, the others are would like to have:
- Session ID
· Date-time of visit
· URL referrer (particularly relevant for tracking the traffic arising from affiliates)
· Client IP address
· URI Stem (the page accessed)
· User Agent (browser related data used by the client)
· Advertising Campaign (including Publisher)
· Keyword
· Daily spend limit
· Click cost
· Link ranking (i.e., w.r.t. the placement of the ad on whatever page by the Search Engines)
· Conversion Indicator
· Total time of the session
· Total number of pages migrated during the Session.
The output of the study will be a report to the general market place on their click fraud findings along with a private report to each company which participates in the study. It must be stressed that they cannot assist in any reparation of ppc fees.
If the findings are positive that click fraud is a serious issue, it is envisages that Fair Isaac will introduce a click fraud detection product. Their thinking is to place the product at a point where click fraud is detected and advertisers are not billed rather than relying on refunds from the ppc suppliers.
Any data supplied by advertisers will be protected via an NDA (non disclosure agreement) so you can be assured that any data you supply will be treated with the strictest of confidentiality.
If you are interested in contributing to this study, please contact me in the first instance and I will put you in contact with the Fair Isaac's research team.
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(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard
I was very pleased to see that the Google invalid click detection system had intercepted some suspicious activity on my adwords account.
I was running a campaign to drive traffic to this site, in particular to advertise our consultancy services and a number of low quality clicks were captured by my click fraud monitoring software.
I was repeatedly clicked by the same IP address over a period of a few minutes. I took this information and matched it back to my adwords campaign and not only had I not been charged for the clicks, but they had not been registered on my account.
I am very pleased with the outcome, but the lack of visibility of this information is still a concern. Why should I be using third party products to prove Google is catching low quality (or even fraudulent clicks).
I intend to leave the monitoring in place and ensure all future invalid clicks are not registered and to capture evidence on attacks not catered for by the Google algorithm.
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(AF) Click fraud software from ClickTracks
Some commentators in the Blogosphere are suggesting that mobile click fraud will become a problem. In his article A Thorny Issue: Detecting Mobile Search Click-Fraud Chris Silver Smith discusses the fact that PPC on mobile search by providers such as Google is inherently susceptible to click fraud due to:
Chris's article is excellently written and researched, but I would add one fact to his piece in that click fraud on a large scale via a mobile device is probably not cost effective for the fraudster. It is my experience (in the UK) that WAP based browsing is hugely expensive where the end user pays per KB downloaded. Comments on the cost of WAP browsing or other mobile methods via 3G for example from other countries would be welcomed.
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(AF) Search Engine Marketing Magazine Search Marketing Standard
I read with great interest about one commentators idea that market forces and adjustment to max cpc cancels out click fraud.
In their post the blog talk from computer to cd they state:
The key point is that click fraud is already taken into effect when advertisers select the highest amount they will bid. For instance, there is no difference whether an advertiser pays $0.83/click for 121 clicks with 21 being fraudulent, or $1.00/click for 100 clicks when there is absolutely no fraud. In either case, the advertiser pays $100 and generates a profit of $20, and Overture and/or Google make $100. What changes is the advertiser’s yield (e.g., the percent of clickers who purchased the book) which in turn effects their highest bid price. That is, with fraud, 30 out of 121 clickers (24.8%) purchased the book, and without fraud 30 out of 100 clickers (30%) purchased it. Without fraud, the bid price in an efficient market will rise from $0.83 to $1.00.
In summary, online advertisers must focus on analyzing and improving their internal metrics (e.g., conversions) and not worry about click fraud as it is already incorporated into keyword bid prices. Hopefully, the frivolous lawsuits and refund requests spawned by apparent click fraud will end as those in the industry recognize this undeniable fact.
I am not sure if this model stands up to a sustained distributed attacks from click bots, but I think this is a very interesting concept.
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(AF) Click fraud software from Click
Tracks
