No Click Fraud

Official Google Australia Blog: Express yourself with iGoogle

2007-05-01T16:37:00.000+10:00

Official Google Australia Blog: Express yourself with iGoogle

Actually, I have blogged this at http://ash.nallawalla.com/search-engines/google-australia-launches-its-blog/.

Google Advertising Professional

2007-03-06T23:47:00.000+11:00

Got my Google Advertising Professional logo today. Good feeling.

PS. It was tied to my Google account which was in the format ash.nallawalla at [former employer's domain name], which was deleted three weeks later, after I left the company, so I can't link to it. Google is not terribly interested in the problem other than by saying that the qualification is tied to the company MCC. :( Respectfully, I think this is mis-guided.

If an "individual" is "qualified" it is because he or she studied for the exam and passed it. The MCC merely managed the minimum required spend. Google has advised me to sit the exam again with my own MCC. Surely, Google needs more GAPs.

What do you think? Please comment.

Anti-Phishing Working Group

2007-02-27T20:32:00.000+11:00

The APWG is peripherally connected with click fraud, inasmuch as it tracks crimeware that is capable of turning zombie PCs into click fraud vectors. Anyone tracking phishing or related topics should check it out.

Who is behind that web site?

2006-11-14T08:30:00.000+11:00

There was a famous cartoon in the New Yorker Magazine with a caption, "On the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog." These days anyone with a bit of talent can get free or $1.99 hosting and put up an impressive web site. If the site causes someone to think that it is a substantial company, whose fault is it if something goes wrong?

Similarly, in the click fraud detection service area, companies need to check who is behind the companies that see your click data. Where does the data sit, who has access to it and is it secure? I don't mean to suggest that the proverbial entrepreneur-in-a-garage is evil. Far from it, given that companies such as Google and HP started in garages. You cannot really find out if organised crime is behind such a company - organised crime is already alleged to be behind some click fraud. Would your click data be valuable to a competitor? Think about it.

CNBC Video of Google Settlement

2006-11-13T19:36:00.000+11:00

CDD and PIRG (who?) complain about adCenter

2006-11-06T08:23:00.000+11:00

I hadn't heard of the Center for Digital Democracy or the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which isn't surprising since I am in Australia, but perhaps they need the publicity. They have complained about Microsoft adCenter and other online services that collect information. The PC World article says:

CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester called on the FTC to shut down new forms of online data collection until consumer safeguards are in place. "Consumers have the right to have the option to opt in [to data collection]," he said. "What is wrong with letting the consumers make decision about how their data is used?"

Privacy fanatics want to be totally anonymous unless they deem otherwise. It's a nice thought but most of them don't run businesses, so they ignore the notion that business owners just might be able to deliver better service if they can collect some information about their customers. Similarly, there is a whole personalisation and CRM industry out there telling business owners to serve different customers differently (look up Peppers & Rogers).

Given my background in marketing and being a user of PPC advertising, I am on the side of CRM but this isn't about me. When Microsoft launched adCenter, I applauded the ability to refine the demographic target audience for my ads. I don't want to waste my money on an anonymous audience but I don't want to know their names and personal details.

I wonder if these complainants are aware that Google also allows demographic targeting. Why didn't they pick on the larger player? Here is the quote:

Chester called online data collection "pervasive and ubiquitous" and said the two groups focused first on Microsoft because it has told potential advertisers its data collection techniques are better than those used by rivals such as Google and Yahoo.

How is this relevant to click fraud? It is, in the sense that to protect these privacy fanatics against phishing and other nasties (and advertisers from click fraud), someone needs to collect information, in this case, about the bad guys. I don't know if there is any way to identify the bad guys without collecting behavioural information!

I am active in running volunteer user groups and recently set up the Zune User Group. I used adCenter Labs to see what information was available about my target audience. Not surprisingly, I found that the target age group is <18,>

YAOAACF by San Jose Business Journal

2006-10-03T09:27:00.000+10:00

No easy answers for advertisers suffering from online click fraud
By Mark Larson

Small businesses are increasingly turning to third party "click monitoring" companies as a way to help prevent being charged for the type of phantom business that recently cost Google Inc. $90 million in an Arkansas court settlement.

Nothing new here apart from exposure for a couple of companies.

MySpace: A Click Fraud Social Network?

2006-10-01T20:31:00.000+10:00

IncrediBILL's Random Rants: MySpace: A Click Fraud Social Network?

Check out my fellow WW member's post exposing major web properties such as Blogger and YouTube for apparently ignoring posters who encourage clicking ads. Here are some YouTube posters who encourage clicks.

Clickprints on the Web

2006-09-26T13:09:00.000+10:00

Wharton professor Balaji Padmanabhan and Yinghui Yang, a professor at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis have published a paper entitled, "Clickprints on the Web: Are There Signatures in Web Browsing Data?" They reveal how it is possible to identify unique users based merely on their browsing behaviour.

These professors are on the right track, but they are looking at finding click patterns of individuals more so than finding suspicious click behaviour. This could be useful for "confirming" that a single user at a multi-user IP address is generating invalid clicks.

AdSense publisher clicks ads on her site; sues Google

2006-09-04T13:43:00.000+10:00

Now this isn't click fraud in the usual sense but a funny story about a woman whose AdSense account was cancelled because she admitted clicking ads on her own site. She mustn't have read the ToS or heard of the preview tool.

The thread in Geek Village is funny too.

Yet another click fraud lawsuit (YACFL)

2006-08-23T08:44:00.000+10:00

Why am I not surprised to read about yet another click fraud lawsuit?

This eweek article mentions a proposed class action against Google by one Samuel Lasoff. He seems to be an advertiser but the article talks about aggrieved publishers:

"and accuses Google of exposing publishers to click fraud following a breach of contract,"

I can't find the original filing in the PA courthouse (what a quaint, 1990s web site!) so I can't tell if he is a publisher or advertiser. He certainly appears to be an affiliate, so I suspect he had Adwords pointing to his sites.

Let's see what happens.

Click! Mouse fraud bytes web advertisers

2006-08-15T12:57:00.001+10:00

Emma Connors and Mark Jones have written about click fraud in today's Australian Financial Review. Unfortunately the article cannot be viewed online for free. They write that Nielsen/NetRatings is starting research into this issue in Australia. They are going to look at the behaviour of IP addresses, exactly what I said in the same article!

Also quoted is ClickSentinel, which claims that 30% of clicks are fraudulent. I wonder if Shuman Ghosemajumder's team at Google will look into this claim next. :)

Baidu accused of click fraud

2006-08-15T12:52:00.000+10:00

China Search Engine Watch blogged about a demonstration by advertisers outside Baidu's Beijing offices: (sic)

On August 4, 2006, some advertisers gathered outside Chinese search engine Baidu's office building and demonstrate against its click faults. From the post boards presented by the demonstrators, it was said that 70% of clicks on Baidu's paid ads were invalid. The claimed data was notarized by Beijing Notarization Bureau. The advertisers came to the building during lunch time and were expelled by the security guards.

Google's analysis of click fraud detection

2006-08-09T14:13:00.000+10:00

This 17-page report from Google's click quality team makes a lot of sense. Look at the US search engine conference speaker list for the past three years and witness the same names saying much the same things. Most of them represented click fraud detection services. I don't blame them for promoting their services and I don't claim to know how good they all were. There had been this figure of 30% click fraud bandied around as an industry norm. I have not seen this in the few accounts I have access to but I am not in a position to guess what it might be.

The Google report on third-party click fraud auditing is critical of poorly substantiated estimates of click fraud. Quote:

Over the last year, these estimates have received widespread media coverage. A different kind of report (from Outsell, Inc.) has also been widely cited for estimating the scope of the problem. But in fact that report did not measure click fraud it was an opinion survey of advertisers asking them to guess at the extent of the problem. Thus the report's conclusions about the percentage of fraud and financial loss for the industry are essentially a poll of the perception of the size of the problem (with the backdrop of the previous coverage of high estimates) rather than actual size of the problem. This is analogous to estimating crime rates in a country by asking some residents how much crime they think there is, and averaging those guesses to state that number is the actual rate.

The main problem seems to be fictitious clicks of two kinds:

Fictitious clicks due to detection of page reloads as ad clicks.

Fictitious clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks.

The page-reloading behaviour problem is handled very nicely by Visitlab. Their reporting shows a visitor's path through the site and shows the initial paid click and subsequent traversals of the same page as internal clicks. A poorly designed click fraud detection mechanism might show each reload as a separate click.

In the early days of Visitlab, such clicks showed as multiple (suspicious) clicks but no more.

I have not seen the second kind of problem, where each click goes through a third party audit service and clicks within the site are counted, as are clicks arising on another advertiser service such as Overture/Yahoo.

Blatant invitation to click ads

2006-08-07T08:58:00.000+10:00

This was seen two days ago at a publisher site and the AdSense is still showing regular ads. Search for the text you can see in the image and find the URL.

IAB announces the formation of industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group

2006-08-03T22:27:00.000+10:00

It is heartening to read about the formation of a working group comprising the major PPC ad companies including Ask.com, Google, LookSmart, Microsoft and Yahoo!. They will initially define Click Measurement Guidelines, thereby defining a click.

Although this is a start, I'd like to see a consortium of such companies team up with other major web sites such as Amazon and eBay to develop what I loosely refer to as an "IP address score". It would be a multidimensional, not flat numeric, score, and be available to consortium members to use as an additional input to their own proprietary click quality algorithms. It could have other uses outside this click fraud space.

Google AdWords lifts veil (a little)

2006-07-27T08:41:00.000+10:00

Finally, Google has bowed to pressure and given advertisers a way to see what it calls "invalid clicks". Anyone managing a large account has known that Google chucks random little amounts as account credits, which are explained as refunds for invalid clicks.

I have said in this blog for some time and in WIRED magazine that Google is good at keeping click fraud at bay, so I am not surprised to see a low rate of invalid clicks in one account.

Several participants in the AdWords forum on Webmasterworld have shared their own invalid click statistics. It seems to be below 4% for most of the posters.

But it all depends on the total spend. For a $45,000 spend, 4.2% is worth $1900 of savings because Google detected it. For a $65,000 spend, 3.7% invalid clicks add up to $2400. Advertisers can still speculate how many invalid clicks won't be picked up by Google. The "get paid to read ads" scams are still around.

Back to the WW discussion, europeforvisitors made a good point, "ROI is what determines whether an advertiser is in or out." Many advertisers seem to treat invalid clicks just as a retailer treats shoplifting - as long as the ROI is good, click fraud is part of the cost of doing business.

There is still a place for independent click fraud detection services. It would be great if Google were to release some more information about those invalid clicks - where they came from, IP addresses, time of day, number of clicks from each source. This is unlikely to happen, as it would drag Google into lawsuits between advertisers and the alleged invalid clickers.

The sun rises in the East (YAOAACF)

2006-07-19T10:59:00.000+10:00

eMarketer cites a company that is offering a $495, 27-page report on how much money is being lost to click fraud. I think there is money to be made is by writing about the click fraud threat. Now why didn't I think of that?

At least we agree that there is growing apathy towards CF in advertiser land.

Bruce Schneier YAOAACF

2006-07-14T09:09:00.000+10:00

Bruce Schneier has discovered two of the four or five kinds of click fraud as seen in this YAOAACF (Yet Another Obligatory Article About Click Fraud). Nothing new there, but he mentions fraud in online gaming activities and cost-per-action (CPA) ads.

Ah well, that should fulfil July's quota of click fraud articles.

Ben Edelman's report on syndicated click fraud

2006-04-29T13:18:00.000+10:00

I was privileged to meet and listen to Ben Edelman at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in January 2006. His presentations are technical - where the audience needs to know what is a packet sniffer, for example. His recent report has made small waves in various online communities. He accuses Yahoo of being complicit in syndicated click fraud. He says:

In my August syndication fraud examples, an advertiser only pays Yahoo if a user clicks the advertiser's ad. Not so for three of today's examples. Here, spyware completely fakes a click -- causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a "pay-per-click" fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is "click fraud."
This document offer four fully-documented examples of improper ad displays (1, 2, 3, 4), including three separate examples showing click fraud. I then develop a taxonomy of the problem and suggest strategies for improvement.

Ben shows [quote]"video, screenshot, and packet log proof of how spyware vendors and advertisement syndicators defraud Yahoo's advertisers".[unquote]

Rivetting reading!

In Game of Click and Mouse, Advertisers Come Up Empty

2006-04-29T13:05:00.000+10:00

Leslie Walker reported in the Washington Post last month:

Google has repeatedly pooh-poohed click fraud, contending that it is a minor annoyance that it has under control with automated detection technology. At a meeting with analysts two weeks ago, chief executive Eric Schmidt said click fraud "is not a material issue." Co-founder Sergey Brin said such cases amount to "a small fraction" of Google's ad clicks.
But six days later, Google surprised analysts when it agreed to settle an Arkansas class-action lawsuit by setting aside $90 million worth of ad credits to advertisers that can show invalid click charges dating to 2002.

The article is about Radiator.com whose click fraud auditor [quote] "ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. Likewise, 17 percent of the leads that came from Yahoo search results were illegitimate." [unquote]

As reported in previous posts, click fraud thrives, as seen in the projects commissioned at the freelance sites, and it was probably very easy to perpetrate back in 2002. I look forward to hearing more reports of how bad it is in 2006. Would any click fraudsters care to comment?

Who wins from click fraud?

2006-04-29T12:54:00.000+10:00

Jason Lee Miller has written an interesting article in WebProNews as a follow up to the class-action lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas against Google. The plaintiffs' lawyers will apparently receive $30M! The preliminary settlement awards advertisers covered by the suit just 0.5%.

Click Fraud Less Than Expected

2006-04-27T10:29:00.000+10:00

The average click-fraud rate across search-advertising industries is 13.7 percent, according to Click Forensics.

This is an interesting statistic and confirms my suspicion that the major PPCSEs are fairly good at keeping advertisers happy.

While you wait for them to ready their free click fraud detector, you can use the free click fraud service at Visitlab

Click fraud with only a $150 investment?

2006-04-14T10:37:00.000+10:00

Here is an interesting customer looking for a programmer to build a click fraud tool (I think):

I need a VERy VERY strong/expert custom click fraud program. This program should work, undetectable and pure random.

.
It would be a good project for someone working for Google AdWords/Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter to monitor.

Multiple clicker drops in to visit

2006-03-18T16:09:00.000+11:00

Just after saying that there wasn't any suspicious activity of late, an AOL visitor appeared to click a few times on the 14th. Google has recorded only one click, so no real harm done.

No click fraud here

2006-03-04T08:38:00.000+11:00

This is more of a non-post, only because my tiny PPC account has not noted any click fraud of late. I am not complaining. Perhaps sites that show evidence of a click fraud service tracking code are being avoided by the organised click fraud gangs?

Click fraud company sold for $21M

2005-12-24T11:32:00.000+11:00

Litmus Media, which runs a click fraud company called ValidClick is the subject of a Letter of Intent to be bought for $21M by the Think Partnership. Follow the link for details.

Forget Click Fraud, Fix Technical Money Loss

2005-12-04T13:55:00.000+11:00

IncrediBill makes an insightful post about the "hysteria" of click fraud and that it is a "dead horse". Be that as it may, he challenges the PPCSEs to fix technical issues such as:

1. Advertiser's site goes offline, so the clicks go nowhere.

2. A network issue leads to dead clicks

3. Accidental ad clicks

Check out his post.

Informal Click Fraud (aka Click Fraud as tip jar)

2005-11-09T16:09:00.000+11:00

The blog writer at FrozenNorth.org has posed an interesting variant of click fraud, which he describes as an electronic tip jar. Before AdSense, some web sites used to encourage visitors to click the ads and visit the advertisers but as this contravenes the AdSense ToS, a publisher cannot openly encourage clicks. I don't see such use of AdSense as being any more of a tip jar than, say, its use on any other publisher page.

Four keyphrases, four ads clicked within 34 seconds

2005-10-12T13:05:00.000+10:00

Now here is a classic click fraud symptom. This user at 172.24.6.31 used a proxy server at a Level3 site 65.57.245.11 in San Francisco to find four of our ads and click them within seconds.

Update: The "cuplrit" was Google. Apparently the Adwords people use this IP address when checking your ads. :) The official answer from Google about these clicks was some boilerplate answer which said how wonderful their system is, but nothing specific.

Stopclickfraud.com

2005-10-10T21:57:00.000+10:00

Øystein Halseth Lund has a great site that features click fraud - how people commit it and what the SEs are doing about it. Well worth a read!

Kanoodle - Computer Generated Clicks

2005-10-10T21:25:00.000+10:00

In this post and in a followup, John Cunningham writes about his experiences with Kanoodle.

The Chattanooga Click Click

2005-10-10T20:37:00.000+10:00

This Bellsouth user in Chattanooga, TN, just loves to click - 11 times, no less. He didn't buy any calendars after all that. Google only charged me one click, which could have been for someone else.

Another shed-loving AOL clicker

2005-10-07T22:10:00.000+10:00

I am seeing such click behaviour daily and cannot make up my mind whether this is fraud or a novice web user. Unless I were to see someone clicking an ad several times to return to an advertiser's site, I won't be able to ask them why they do that.

OT: JenSense interviews an AdSense millionaire

2005-09-18T16:35:00.000+10:00

My fellow Webmasterworld member JenStar runs the best known AdSense site that I know of. Here is an inspirational interview with the man who has over 80 blogs and makes over $1M a year from AdSense. He has 9 staff and over 100 blog writers...

Adsense Click Fraud Dissected

2005-09-18T16:15:00.000+10:00

This article by Joseph Tierney is different from the usual rehash of how click fraud is perpetrated. Many sites have reprinted this article and it is worth reading to see a fresh dissection of the typical AdSense ad and how it is easy for the knowledgeable culprits to get past Google's click fraud detection service.

'Click fraud' suit against Google, others sent back to state court

2005-09-18T14:24:00.000+10:00

(Extract)

TEXARKANA, Ark. (AP) - A federal appeals court says a class-action lawsuit alleging "click fraud" by Google Inc. and other Internet companies should be heard in state court rather than in a federal courtroom.

I don't know much about the US legal system, but wouldn't it make life easier for all concerned if there was one ruling that applied to all of the US?

More from law.com

Viet Cong and Click Fraud

2005-09-17T10:25:00.000+10:00

You might not think this is funny. When I was in high school I used to read about these bad guys called the Viet Cong (VC). While searching for occurrences of "click fraud", I found this post called A VC: Internet Axis of Evil (continued) where a VC named Fred Wilson lists Click Fraud as one of the Internet Axis of Evil. Now I don't live and breathe the jargon of the Valley, since I live in Melbourne, Oz. So it took a few seconds to register that Fred wasn't the kind of VC that I instinctively think of.

It is reassuring to see a growing awareness of this problem but this awareness is minuscule. Taking the world of PPC advertisers, I suspect that the majority is not even aware of the problem. My day job involves running a department that sells search engine marketing services to the SME sector. Many say to my staff, "I am wasting $xxxx on Overture/Google/whatever" - either they don't know how to write ads or to bid wisely, or they have experienced click fraud - or all the above.

Then there is the sceptical segment that says, "Yes, it has got to exist but is it really a problem?". This segment can be turned into true believers if only they found a way to track their clicks. I hang out (when visiting the US or online) with some of the identities at Webmasterworld and many of them make tidy sums in the affiliate marketing game. Some use PPC ads to drive traffic. With 1-2 exceptions, the rest are singularly not interested in the click fraud problem. This ostrich mentality is troubling.

The final segment includes our friendly VC in New York, John Battelle, a few others, and me. Perhaps you too. Please comment on why don't PPC advertisers want to know about click fraud.

MarketingExperiments.com research on click fraud

2005-09-15T22:41:00.000+10:00

Our research indicates that as much as 30% of paid search traffic may be fraudulent.

This site requires free registration to view the material.

One of their experiments was to place an ad on a contrived phrase (click fraud spelt backwards) and they clicked the AdWord repeatedly. Their findings agree with mine that clicking one ad repeatedly will either not register at all in Google, or at worst you will be charged for only one click.

Clicks made from a sophisticated adversary are a totally different matter.

Vericlix comparison

2005-09-11T18:19:00.000+10:00

I also track my sites with VeriClix, a free service. Someone's clock is out of sync, because the visit from the Comcast subscriber shows only once at Vericlix, but a few minutes out, so I cannot say which of the four clicks it is.

Google's click fraud detection better than I thought

2005-09-11T17:52:00.000+10:00

I hate to admit it, but you have to give credit where it is due. I have been following just one keyword but it may apply to others. Google has only charged me for one click in the past 7 days when the suspicious clicks for that keyword are at least 10 to 15.

I think I know what click behaviour is ignored by the Adwords software (i.e. not charged to the advertiser) but I am not going to spell it out here.

Arrow sheds attract the clickers

2005-09-11T17:36:00.000+10:00

What is it with Arrow Sheds? They're probably OK, if you are into sheds, but these "arrow shed" searchers just like to click my ads but they don't buy anything. This Comcast visitor from Nashua, NH is a good example of the 2-3 daily clickers who visit my site every day. At least he made an effort to click deep into the site before going back to the Google SERP and clicking the ad four times.

Does click fraud bother you?

2005-09-09T22:30:00.000+10:00

I have had a few conversations with several people about click fraud tracking services and have found a common theme: they are sceptical about click fraud and are sceptical about services that claim to find it. This does not make sense to me.

Is it like people who don't believe in god also don't believe in a service (religion) that claims to find this elusive being? Now that makes sense to me. :)

Are there any true believers (in click fraud)?

Organic paid clicker

2005-09-03T14:25:00.000+10:00

On the 29th, this user from rrcs-24-73-180- 122.se.biz.rr.com used an organic search result, then a paid click, then an internal click, followed by the usual pattern of paid-organic-paid-organic traversal.

Texan clicker

2005-09-03T14:14:00.000+10:00

Looking at an earlier visitor, this person showed a similar tendency of clicking an ad, then an inner page.

Drilling down the AOL visitor

2005-09-03T12:54:00.000+10:00

Drilling down the IP address of this visitor, you can see that he (they're always "he", right?) clicked an ad, then clicked an internal link; clicked the same ad, then clicked an internal link; clicked the ad, then three internal links.

This can also be seen in the click path in the second screen shot.

The AOL clicker

2005-09-03T12:06:00.000+10:00

AOL is favoured by clickers because the IP address never stays the same. In one session, you could be given numerous IP addresses. This visitor searched for "arrow sheds" more than once.

Strange click pattern

2005-09-03T11:55:00.000+10:00

The PPC Fraud Analysis view shows recent clicks and I am showing the weekly view. I look for entries that show more than one click. Let's look at the second entry.

Victim of click fraud

2005-09-03T10:07:00.000+10:00

I manage PPC accounts for myself and my employer and have done so for others in the past. I know that click fraud exists - or there are some very strange individuals out there who love to click the same PPC ads several times.

I have enabled three of my sites with the free (during beta) click fraud service by Visitlab. I am going to post examples here.