Click Fraud Dialog Finally Begins: How Google’s Actions Can Kickstart Healthier Conversation
Just how sinister click fraud really is has been a topic of conversation that, up until now, has been a dialog between advertisers, search engines marketing firms, auditing firms, and of course, the courts. Who we have not heard from in any real detail have been the search engines themselves. There have been numerous reasons, of course, the major one being legal. Once lawsuits start, defendants tend to be told by their legal experts to keep their mouths shut.
In a very short period of time, though, this has changed, particularly for Google, who has become very proactive. In the last couple of weeks, the search giant has opened up and had plenty to say. In my opinion, this can only be considered a good move on Google’s part and good for the industry overall. Here are these actions in a short list:
1. Google, working with the courts on the Lane lawsuit, allowed a third-party expert, Professor Smith at NYU, to have access to their click fraud team and ask many questions. The result is a 47-page report which concluded that Google’s efforts are reasonable.
2. Google has added a feature to its AdWords interface which allows advertisers to view the number of invalid clicks that Google had eliminated before an advertiser is billed. In other words, it is its own internal audit of invalid clicks.
3. Google has written a document in which it criticizes three of the click fraud auditing firms and their methodology. The major criticism is that they are over-counting invalid clicks which Google itself doesn’t count towards paid clicks.
4. The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, have joined together with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to form an industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group to create a set of Click Measurement Guidelines.
The Tuzhilin Audit
The biggest item is the study that was done for the Lane lawsuit by a court-appointed expert, Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University. On page one, the Executive Summary states:
“I have been asked to evaluate Google’s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google’s campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google’s employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google’s invalid click detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information narrated to me by Google’s employees, I conclude that Google’s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this point.”
The thing that strikes me right away in the report is the size of the staff and who is assigned to what kind of work. The staff is comprised of 36 people, one-third of whom are engineers, while the rest are doing manual investigation. More than anything else, this is an indication to me that Google takes click fraud seriously. Why? Well, if you’ve had to do your own internal click fraud audit, you know how labor-intensive it can be. There is no magic bullet to hunting down these types of problems. Another problem is training someone to do this work, which is very tough and requires one to possess numerous skills.
The second thing that strikes me is that Professor Tuzhilin finds the click fraud filters that Google is using are rather simple but effective. Talking to most advertisers, the fraud that is found tends to match simple patterns. In other words, it’s still mostly manually-driven, not sprung from some type of sophisticated zombie network. But yes, they are working on the next generation of filtering technology.
Still, one big negative is that the professor makes no mention of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if he’s only talking with Google, of course he’s likely to come away with the idea that Google is doing everything just fine.
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