When Click Fraud Attacks! Is the Threat Real Enough to Fight Back?
Mature Online Markets
This is very much related to the last item; if your competitor understands your profit and loss factors, they know the thin line between positive and negative ROI. One solution is to look at the long tail for search terms your competitor isn’t going after, even if you’re not being attacked.
Are the Terms Expensive
Clicks that are more then a couple of dollars will attract fraud, but this has to be measure against the other factors. Don’t panic, measure and know what your ROI is, then you have a better understand when and if you’ve got a problem.
What Can You Do?
Measure — Metrics
You can’t stop a problem if you don’t KNOW there’s a problem. Many firms today still don’t track their ROI. It’s easy to understand why. Search Engine Marketing is still so much more effective compared to other advertising mediums that it’s easy to ignore. If a brand manager assigns just a small percentage of the budget to SEM its still money well spent.
Get Outside Help
There are a number of companies that are starting to specialize in click fraud auditing. Most advertisers have found that producing an audit trail to prove to the search engines that there was a fraud incidence is the real problem. It’s getting the search engines to give you a refund that is the main issue. This is a problem across the board, with Google being somewhat more cooperative. So unless the vendor, whether you are looking at software or a service or a combination of both, actually deals with the fraud group at the search engines you’re not really getting that much help.
What the Search Engines Can Do
Communicate, Darnit!
The search engines are in denial and don’t want to talk, and this won’t work. First, they are mostly publicly held corporations and are accountable under Sarbanes Oxley.
Agree to Audits
This is standard practice in the computer security industry. Bring in a third party to audit your fraud detection methodologies.
Summary
Let me close by saying if click fraud was so bad, advertisers would — well stop advertising — which simply isn’t the case. Sponsored links on the search engines is still one of the most effective forms of advertising there is, in an amazing medium for communication, the commercial Internet.
PS
I very excited to be invited to write for Adotas. I feel a sense of regret that I have to take this almost attack dog stance in my first article. In the coming months I hope to focus on SEM and what I feel are its strengths and weaknesses, as part of the overall advertising industry.
Reader Comments.
Click fraud has become a huge problem for companies playing in the PPC and SEM space. Google just happens to be the most visible, especially since they are forking over $90 million USD for the current click fraud problems to go away. The problem is they won’t go away. Click fraud is a problem for Yahoo too, and everyone else in the PPC/SEM space.
Now there is technology available to stem the click fraud tide but, as a colleague of mine expressed recently, if Google turns on the ValidClick switch, their revenues drop by 36% and everyone says “hey, what happened here”. Then Google has to answer why they didn’t prevent the fraud sooner, not to mention the obvious loss of revenue.
We need to look to the next generation of PPC networks to make this problem go away. The newer networks are getting wise and filtering out click fraud from the ground up using tools like ValidClick. But Google has a slipery slope to navigate.
ValidClick appears to be the only technology that filters out click fraud in the click stream itelf. So fraudulent clicks never actually make it through, but are sent to the site host instead.
It will be interesting to see what happens with the Google case but in the long-term they will have to fix the problem or they will be a victim of their own success.
IMO, CPC is itself the problem, as is CPM, CPA, etc. At this stage of
Internet protocol and architecture development, it is too easy to
manufacture clicks, impressions, etc. that can fall under the radar of
any click analysis technology. I have always wondered why Google, as
talented as their engineers are, didn’t realize this.
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Tags: best_practices, click_fraud, performance_marketing and search_marketingArticle Sponsor
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