How to Fight Click Fraud and Save Your Company Money

Almost 15% of all clicks on online ads are a result of click fraud, costing your company money without providing any benefit. Unfortunately, click fraud is difficult to detect and not adequately prevented by the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. You can save your company money and be the hero by making the marketing department aware of click fraud and the methods of prevention. Here's how:

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Your company pays search engines such as Google and Yahoo! when someone clicks on one of your company's ads. However, not all of the clicks are generated by legitimately interested parties who are potential customers. This costs your company money without generating any revenue. The fraudulent clicks can originate from either automated clickbots or Paid-to-Read (PTR) operations where actual humans are employed to generate the clicks.

2. Make marketing aware of click fraud. IT managers especially have a great opportunity to be a hero and save the enterprise money by ensuring that marketing is aware of the impact of click fraud.

3. Look for suspicious patterns in ad-generated traffic such as a dramatic change in the ratio between the number of clicks on the ads and the revenue generated. Click fraud is most commonly characterized by dramatic increases in traffic without similar increases in revenue.

4. Another pattern stems from clicks that involve an unrealistic short browsing time. Potential clients who click on the ads will stay on the site for a limited amount of time, browsing around, searching for the information they need. Conversely, members of PTR (paid-to-read) rings or clickbots have the incentive to click on as many ads as possible. Therefore, traffic generated by false clicks usually disappears within seconds.

5. Also look for clicks generated from illogical locations. Traffic generated via click fraud often originates from illogical locations that do not match the services of your company.

6. Document the findings. It is important to build a clear and strong case proving click fraud as this increases the likelihood of your company being able to receive a refund from the search engines.

7. Hire professional help. If your company spends a significant amount on online advertising, forensic firms are available to help analyze data to detect click fraud. Companies such as ClickForensics help analyze clicking patterns and Web site traffic to detect fraud.

8. Ensure marketing knows that there are options for recourse. Your company can demand refunds and request their ads be removed from parked sites. Google, as an example, removes ads from parked sites only when your company demands for it. In other words, your company needs to be active in updating the "do not advertise" list, as it is not proactively managed by Google. At this time, Yahoo! does not allow enterprises to remove their advertising from parked sites.

Tips & Warnings

• What is a clickbot? It is software that automatically generates clicks on ads. Some can even mask the origin and the timing of the clicks.
• What is a parked website? It is a site with little or no information, except for ads, which are often supplied by Google or Yahoo!. A common source of false clicks. Parked web sites are also known as domain parking sites or parked sites.
• What is a PTR ring? It is a Paid-to-Read ring where members are paid to click on ads, often on parked web sites.
• Click fraud is hard to detect and is costly to businesses as it generates unnecessary advertising expenses. While companies should not stop using online advertising, they need to monitor traffic for suspicious patterns in case they have become victims of click fraud.

Resources

• ClickForensics - The Industry Leader in Traffic Quality Management

[scleveland]

on 11/16/2008 Very informative, Thanks!

[thesquirrelymom]

on 11/5/2008 Now that's interesting.

[sunshine11219]

on 11/4/2008 a lot of info good article