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.

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(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.

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(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 :-) 

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.

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

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

Affiliate Marketing 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