Paid Search -- Doctor Ebiz Q&A

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How to Detect and Deal with Click Fraud

"If I suspect click fraud, what resources (software or services) do you recommend?" -- Jerry Bohlken, eFinancialAid.com

It's disturbing to think that you might be losing advertising money due to click fraud, but it is apparently more common than we'd like to acknowledge. Motives could include financial gain, competitive advantage, revenge and blackmail. There are three kinds of click fraud these days in relation to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising:

• Network click fraud -- bogus click-throughs by the publisher on ads that appear on his site in order to raise his revenues.
• Competitive click fraud -- bogus clicks by competitors, especially for high cost words, designed to bankrupt their competitors.
• Impression fraud -- bogus searches displaying ads but with no click-throughs. The effect is to lower the competitor's click-through rate and disqualify or lower a competitor's ad ranking.

These frauds are pretty subtle. PPC vendors block more obvious fraud, such as multiple clicks from the same IP address in a period of 30 minutes. But fraud can be programmed to occur in the background, in a seemingly random fashion, making it much harder to spot. Other click fraud is reputedly being outsourced to low-priced labor in India and elsewhere.

You can't necessarily stop the fraud, but if you can demonstrate a pattern of fraud, you can take this data to Google or Yahoo and demand a refund for the fraudulent portion on the basis that they shouldn't be making money on what can be demonstrated to be fraudulent. There is some pressure to develop a class action suit against Google and Yahoo for not deducting for click fraud in their pricing unless forced to.

If you outsource your PPC campaigns to an agency, it should be looking for fraud as one of its services to you. If you're running your PPC campaigns in-house, I recommend that you search the Web for "click fraud auditing" or "click auditing." You'll find several firms that will track what's going on with your PPC ads. One of these is:

Who'sClickingWho (PPC Audit Inc.). In addition to tracking records, includes an optional unblockable ClickMinder pop-up that appears after 5 or more clicks to warn and deter abusers.

For more information search for "click fraud" in my Web Marketing Info Center. http://www.wilsonweb.com/cat/