Re: False Clicks/Click Fraud
David Yancey wrote:
> We recently completed the Beta test for a new e-commerce
> site. Over a five month period, we gained first-hand
> experience with clickfraud coming from Google's Adwords
> program and several other PPC services. We can confirm that
> clickfraud is a very serious and costly problem for at least
> a percentage of e-commerce sites in sectors where competitive
> pressure is intense.
This sounds like paranoia to me. You are asserting that your
competitors marshaled thousands of computers on different IP
addresses to click on your ads to eat up your ad budget and
drive you from the market with fraudulent clicks.
I appreciate your extended and detailed analysis, but there is
something missing. How did you determine that a click was
fraudulent? What is your criteria?.
If you are saying a spidering bot was hitting all these
AdSense-enabled sites and clicking the ads, I assume your logs
show the clicks coming from the same bot Ip or ip cloud? How
specifically do you know that it is the operation of a bot or
bots, and not lots of different people clicking on AdSense
ads?
If your response is that the conversion rates were different
for PPC traffic from Google AdSense-delivered clicks, that is
no evidence of fraud.
Brad Jensen
Received on Tue Aug 15 2006 - 13:12:46 CDT
