I was at a bookshop a while ago and came across a book on click fraud. There was a section dedicated to click fraud detection. Mind you it’s not about how Google or other companies detect click frauds but it’s about how normal blogger or publisher like us can prevent third party sabotaging our sites with illegal clicks. I’m not sure how useful this would be for everyone but i’m sure for noobs like me, it would be interesting and maybe helpful. Who knows? You might find out that your annoying sister had been clicking your ads for fun. Or you could save yourself from wrongful allegations and a lawsuit. Well maybe.

1. Click fraud: what is it?

Click fraud occurs when a pay per click advertising link is clicked on for a malicious reason – in other words, by somebody (or a piece of software) that isn’t interested in the products, services on content the advertiser’s website.

2. Types of click fraud - and who carries it out

Affiliate fraud
Search engine affiliates are websites that implement results from a search engine onto their websites. Legitimate examples of this include the WSJ, which displays contextual PPC adverts from Overture, and Search.com, which uses search results from Google.

Affiliates like these receive a share of each click on a PPC advert from the PPC engine. Affiliate fraud occurs when an affiliates seeks to artificially increase the number of clicks on paid listings and so increase the revenue they earn. They do this by manually clicking on the links, paying other people to do this for them or using automated software to click on links. Typically they will target terms with high bids.

Competitor fraud
This occurs when one company clicks on a competitor’s advert to spend their budget with the longer term aim of making PPC advertising too expensive for them – and therefore removing a competitor from the search engine results.

Unintentional “fraud”
This happens when a piece of software clicks on a link without the intention of costing the advertiser money – for example, a search engine spider might follow a PPC link on a web page whilst crawling it. Well-designed websites will endeavour to avoid this and the better PPC engines will detect these clicks and not charge advertisers for them – but they do get through. Link checking software can also click on PPC links.

3. How to detect it

First of all you need to make sure you are recording the right data. Record the clicker’s IP address, time and date of the click, the keyword (of course) and the referring website (ideally the full search string from that site so you check this for strange searches). This data can be found in server logs or in good click tracking software.

You also need to record performance data about your advertising spend over time – especially the amount spent and traffic received – in a spreadsheet so that you can spot any sudden increases in spend. If you are tracking sales or enquiries (and you should be in order to judge the performance of your PPC advertising) you should also record this data, along with the cost per acquisition of each sale / lead.

Regularly examine this data and look for:

• sudden increases in spend (aside from seasonal increases in your sector)
• keywords that don’t normally spend a lot of funds
• suddenly spending well sudden increases in traffic from any one affiliate in the PPC engines network
• lots of clicks from one IP address
• clicks from IP addresses outside the country you are advertising in (you can look up the country an IP address is allocated to using www.dnsstuff.com. Note: free databases like this can sometimes be incorrect).

4. Automating the process

Of course doing this checking manually is time consuming – and if you do detect click fraud and persuade the PPC engines to provide you with a refund, you may find that the amount you receive back is worth less than the amount your time is worth. So you have to judge the financial value of a refund compared to the time you will need to invest in getting it.

One way to reduce the amount of time you spend checking for fraud is to use a third party tool to detect it and gather data (or, if you have the resources, build your own in-house tool). The number of companies offering tools to detect and record click fraud in increasing rapidly. Some of these tools only detect click fraud, others offer more features including ROI tracking and wider website analytics that includes data about organic search engine traffic. Some offer to take care of claiming refunds from the PPC engines, too.

These companies include:
Who’sClickingWho.com – click fraud detection
ClickRisk.com – click fraud detection
ClickDetective.net – click fraud detection
ClickLab – web analytics and click fraud monitoring
Nami Media – tracking and click fraud detection tools
TrackingROI.com – tracking and click fraud detection tools
KeyWordMax.com – integrated click auditing, bid management and ROI tracking

5. Reporting Click Fraud

If you think you have detected click fraud, clearly document the activity you are suspicious of in a spreadsheet including the keyword, IP address of the clicker, date and time of the click and any comments for that keyword (e.g. the click is from a foreign IP).

Write a brief email outlining the trend(s) you have spotted and send this to the PPC engine. Whilst you might feel like shouting at them, don’t – the pers
on you scream at in the email / on the phone will only be passing the query on to the team who investigate traffic quality, and the nicer you are, the more likely they are to go the extra mile to get you an answer.

6. Do the PPC engines care?

The serious PPC engines care a lot about click fraud. Google, Overture and the leading second tier engines have staff dedicated to investigating traffic quality and individual cases of click fraud. Google automatically detects some instances of click fraud and will not charge you for those clicks. Overture also does this, which is one reason why your click tracking software may show more clicks that Overture reports, as Overture is only reporting clicks you were charged for.

Of course the engines don’t discuss how they detect fraud – there is something of an arms race between the fraudsters and the engines – and their fraud detection systems aren’t perfect. Click fraud is a threat to their advertising business model and a concern for directors, shareholders and employees. One of the ways I measure the quality of a PPC engine and its future ambitions is how well they respond to queries about traffic quality – if they are serious about the PPC industry, they must be prepared to investigate clicks and, if necessary, stop providing results to affiliates who commit click fraud. Of course the attitudes of the engines are not always ideal and there needs to be more co-operation between engines to target repeat fraudsters. But things are, on the whole, improving.

Conclusion

Click fraud is like any other business risk; you should take appropriate steps to reduce the risk and gather firm data of any fraud. If you do have evidence of fraud, calmly and clearly present your data to the engines. Serious engines will listen to you and investigate on your behalf. What Do You Think? This article is being discussed at Duncan’s Official PPCA Blog.

The article above was published in 2005. There might be more ways of detecting it by now but it’s a starter. Just remember if you’re not doing anything wrong then have no fear. Gather evidence and stuff it in ‘you-know-who-big-fat-CEO’s-mouth’ and hope he chokes to death.

Sekian terima kasih.