Mechanics of Click Fraud Software

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