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Click Fraud Begone With Google’s Pay-Per-Action

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June 21st 2007
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mouseclick1.jpgGoogle planned to open its pay-per-action (PPA) AdSense beta for qualifying advertisers worldwide today, following a three-month closed trial period.

The PPA service requires advertisers to pay only when users perform a specific action, unlike Google’s popular pay-per-click option which charges advertisers each time a user clicks on their ads.

Google already offers this sort of incentive to publishers who refer business to Google services, but “We wanted to expand this to offer to every advertiser,” said Google Product Manager Rob Kniaz.

This is an attempt to decrease click fraud because an actual action must be performed by the user in order for the publisher and Google to be paid by the advertiser.

At least this is how it works in theory, but according to Kevin Lee, who ran test of the platform over the last couple months; “Our thought was really what we predicted: that CPC ads actually earn Google more money than the CPA ads, and so the ad server just automatically runs the CPC ads instead,” he said.

Google is obviously enjoying success because they seem less motivated by greed and sincerely interested in using their technology to put companies into closer contact with future clients/consumers through the myriad of ways online advertising actually functions.

But, are their new methods diluted or are they capable of meaningful results for all the involved parties?



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Reader Comments.

After working for Direct Response Technologies for several years as the Director of KeywordMax, and now with Click Forensics, my experience tells me that CPA is not the answer to fraud. Search Affiliates who make a living committing fraud will not be detered by a new model. Spoofing a transaction especially leads or download is not very challenging to do. The problem is that catching a spoofed persona is pretty difficult and time consuming. Most of the time, legitimate looking leads will not show themselves as spoofed until several weeks after the transaction when a marketer or sales person attempts to make contact, by then you have paid your cpa fee, and lost your money on the transaction.

A better answer to mitigating your fraud risk is proper tracking, third party auditing, and vendor/advertiser cooperation.

You can get a free fraud diagnostic report at www.clickfraudnetwork.com.

Posted by Lori Weiman | 12:43 pm on June 21, 2007.

I wonder how effective a CPA program would be in terms of minimizing click fraud.

In my mind, it’s just as easy and simply to commit lead fraud, as click fraud. If we’re talking about lead generations or newsletter sign ups, it just takes a few more seconds to fill out a form with fake information as it does to click an ad. And the payouts are probably quite a bit higher, as well.

So, while it may sounds good in theory, I don’t think that it will actually make any difference in practice.

Boris Mordkovich
www.adwatcher.com

Posted by Boris Mordkovich | 11:57 am on June 26, 2007.

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