PPC ClickFraud: Its a Bigger Problem then You Think

Pay per click search engine advertising is one of themost popular ways to promote a website. With Overtureand Google leading the pack, the industry as a wholehas grown immensely in the past few years. Accordingto a report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers, they estimatethat Internet Advertising brought in more than $9 billion in 2004 alone.

With PPC advertising you choose "keywords/phrases,"then bid how much you'd like to pay for each click.When a searcher goes to a search engine and typesin one of your keyphrases, your short text ad appears,and if they click on it your account is then charged.In a "perfect world" this is the way it would work, but thanks to unscrupulous people, there's a dirtylittle secret known as "click fraud."

Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on adsfor the direct purpose of costing the advertisermoney. It's similar to paying out cash for falseleads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of thosewho responded to a survey conducted by the "SearchEngine Professional Organization" had stated thatfraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising.

So where does click fraud come from? Well, there are actually a few different sources:

1) AdSense Users: Google Adsense has a programcalled "Adsense" that pays website owners torun their Adwords ads and compensates them perclick. Google does monitor this and it's againsttheir terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a publishers doing this, they will lose their accounts, butsome may still be clicking under the radar.

2) Your Competitors: Your competitors could beclicking on your ads over a period of severaldays in order to deplete your ad budget.

3) Software: There are those who use automatedclicking tools, such as robot programs, toclick on PPC listings.

In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads for hours. Many don't know why they do it, and don't care, only that they'll be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do a searchon any search engine you'll see plenty of sites looking to hire people for just this purpose. Formore on this see...http://tinyurl.com/2ka5g

Most PPC networks have measures in place to protectyou against click fraud. Overture tracks more than50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info,users' session info and what they call "patternrecognition." They have a "proprietary system" inplace for detecting fraud and a specialized teamthat monitors things and works with the advertisersto stop it.

Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud,such as "using negative keywords" to keep your adsfrom showing up for products and services that areunrelated. They also suggest adding tracking url'sto your links so you can track the traffic comingfrom Google. An easy way to do this is to add a ?to your links along with the identifier. For example,a tracking link to identify Google would look likethis:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?referer-google

If you go through your log files, you'll be able tosee your Google traffic at a glance.

If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right away, as they have a team of researchersthat will investigate. They also take action to blockfuture impressions from anyone they identify ascommitting click fraud. Like Overture, they also have"proprietary technology" that distinguishes betweennormal clicks and invalid ones. Google never billsyou for any "bad clicks" that are caught by theirsystem.

So what's an honest website owner to do? You needto be alert to any "suspicious activity" by researching your server logs or stats. If you'reexperiencing a lot of clicks and no sales you'llalso want to take a closer look. You need to watchfor any spikes in traffic, usually on one keywordor phrase and coming from only one PPC source. Youneed to measure and track all of your PPC accountsclosely.

If this sounds like too much work, you may want tolook at an outside service to take care of it foryou. A variety of new services have opened recentlyto help combat the click fraud problem.

1) Keyword Max: http://www.KeyWordMax.com

Offers up a service called "Click Auditor," whichmonitors the activity on your PPC accounts andalerts you to any suspicious activity. You canrequest a free demo at the site.

2) Click Detective: http://ClickDetective.net

A website monitoring service that uses sophisticatedtracking mechanisms to determine whether "visitorbehavior" is normal or not. Offering a 15 day freetrial. Easy to use, you just copy and paste a snippetof code on your page and add a campaign ID by logginginto your account.

3) Click Assurance: http://ClickAssurance.com

An Internet Security Firm that specializes in clickfraud. They will audit your PPC accounts and go after any refunds you are due because of fraud.

4) Who's Clicking Who: http://WhosClickingWho.com

An independent auditing service that tracks individualusers for fraud. Can also detect abuse coming fromproxy servers. A one month subscription is $79.00, which includes free installation and up to50,000 transactions per month.

5) ClickLab: http://ClickLab.com/products/click-fraud

This service isolates bad clicks with a scorecardbased detection system. Pricing starts at $50.00per month and is based on the number of sites youneed to track and their page views.

ClickLab also has a nice white paper you shoulddownload while visiting: "How to Defend Your WebsiteAgainst Click Fraud."

Click fraud isn't going away anytime soon. If anything, it will probably get worse before it get's any better. It's up to you as a vigilantwebsite owner to do what you can to keep yourPPC advertising costs down. You can't stop it,but with the right tracking in place, it can bemanaged and controlled, and hopefully kept to aminimum.

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