SEL: Click Fraud Uncovered

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Search marketing in the new media era.

April 11, 2005

Click Fraud Uncovered

Joe Holcomb is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for BlowSearch. Over at his personal blog, he has written one of the most eye-opening reports on what is going on with click fraud. His article confirms a lot of what I believe to be true and also reveals a lot of dirty secrets, the other search engines probably don't want you knowing.

It's not your competitor causing the bulk of click fraud...

Many people believe that competitor based click fraud is the larger issue. That is what the search engines are telling the public because it is what they want you to believe. It’s PR spin folks. It masks the real problem of what is going on right now....Competitor based click fraud is minuscule as compared to automated click fraud.

Why the search engines don't want to tackle click fraud...

Why aren’t engines directly addressing the click fraud issue? Frankly it is because it will blow up in their face if they do. Google, Yahoo!, FindWhat, and every other provider is simply helpless to stop click fraud. They just don’t know how to. Nor do they want to until they are forced to do so. There is too much revenue involved for them to block all that traffic, or rather, that revenue.

Look, did you notice that Mr. Giordani said “If we see any, we immediately credit the advertiser’s account and update the filters.” Yes, THAT advertiser. What about all the other advertisers that got hit by the traffic? AYE, there’s the rub!

Why the give you non-specific PPC refunds...

Advertisers have every right to expect PPC companies to disclose what happened to their advertising dollars. It is the advertiser’s hard earned money that PPC providers are spending. However a detailed report of fraudulent activity is not something the PPC provider will deliver. Why? It would mean that they would have to refund every advertiser who received traffic from that bad source. They prefer to refund only their premier advertisers instead.

If you don’t tell the advertiser specifically what happened to cause the refund then there is no risk that other advertisers will seek refunds related to that traffic source. This is sneaky, but it’s a common practice across all major PPC providers. They keep the info in house so that they do not have to massively issue refunds to advertisers. It helps them retain revenue. Oh, I bet Sergey, Larry, and Eric are fuming mad at me right now! I’m glad I don’t work for Google……..

They don't really have "dedicated teams" looking at click fraud...

So as long as they keep you in the dark and give you lip service about “we have dedicated teams of engineers consistently monitoring our traffic” then you’ll leave them alone. Advertisers seem to have bought into that rhetoric. It’s a complete line of bull folks. None of the engines have a clue how to completely stop click fraud and they won’t because there is too much money involved.

Wow! That's a very big finger Joe is pointing at his peers. BlowSearch announced their own methods for tackling click fraud, when they recently announced their own PPC product. Joe has details of what they have in place (which is a lot more of a plug for their services, but worth a read).

So what do you think?

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

...the search industry queries new media