Click fraud: are you a victim?

In 2004, we discussed click fraud in one of our articles and mentioned that 20% of clicks from Pay-Per-Click adverts were potentially fraudulent. Two years later you always hear this same figure, without knowing where it comes from. On the other hand, with the increased investment in this type of publicity, potential fraud went from a few hundred millions of dollars to over a billion, an amount which encourages more advertisers to consider the subject. During their annual survey, SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation) revealed that the number of advertisers who believe click fraud has increased tripled between 2004 and 2005. Concern also reached the stock market at the start of 2006 when an influential analyst at Standard & Poor asserted that Google should attack this problem in a more dynamic way.

The ‘Search Engine Strategies 2006’ show, being held in New York from February 27 to March 2, 2006, taught us, however, that more reliable data could soon see the light of day. In fact, Fair Isaac, a company that analyses 85% of credit card transactions in the United States, will start an important study on the subject to better outline the problem.

Click fraud will always be a risk, and the explosion in the publicity network will not help to decrease it. Click fraud was initially committed by competitors who clicked on adverts to inflate competitors’ invoices. However, a more malignant player has now made its appearance: the avid associate of advertising revenues, a far more dangerous adversary as its objective is to increases its income, one that is often associated with the use of evolved techniques and tools that are not easily identifiable.

Several specialists in the field also fear that many computers unknowingly host software like Clickbot, whose main goal is to generate clicks on PPC (Pay-per-click) type adverts. How can you check if your campaigns are victim of click fraud, and if it is the case, how can you rectify the situation?

The first step is to evaluate your campaigns in addition to the traffic that they generate on your website. Considering the extent of the problem, several statistical tools are able to evaluate if visitors from PPC campaigns are suspect. If your current tools don’t let you glean this information, there are many other software available which will enable you to inspect the situation.

If your investigations lead to a click fraud situation, you can prepare a file and submit it to those responsible for distributing your campaign (Google, Yahoo! etc.) for reimbursement. Even if the search engines confirm that they refund when provided with proof of fraud, several believe that they do little to regulate the problem, but various companies in the field have launched solution methods. You find better exchange of information between advertisers and distributors, the creation of a third independent body that could evaluate fraud cases in a just manner or even establish CPA (cost per acquisition) instead of CPC (cost per click).

While waiting for these methods to come to the fore, the only solution is to remain aware of the state of your PPC campaigns and to measure if your keyword purchasing investments are worth it.