Click Fraud is an issue that has been a conversational topic and issue in the search industry and at SES conferences for several years. Search engines have made major changes to their systems of checks and balances in order to ameliorate fraudulent clicks. After all, why perpetuate an issue that seriously devalues your own product? In the end, however, it comes down to a basic situation that is common to every business and division of government extant in America, do people really trust you to tell the whole truth about your internal processes?
The definition of Click Fraud has expanded from that of intentionally fraudulent clicks to that of unwanted clicks or clicks of no value. In general, categories of unwanted traffic encompass the following categories:
- Fraudulent – Designed to make someone else money at the expense of your campaign
- Fraudulent – Designed to make a competitor’s campaign use their budget at a higher rate
- Unwanted – Clicks to your site by a competitor, a vendor or your own people
- Unwanted – Clicks from a country where you do not have a sales presence
- Unwanted – Clicks generated by faulty engine spiders or marketing bots
- Unwanted – Duplicated clicks generated as part of a shopping comparison
All of these clicks can be measured and detected and a case made that they are not part of a normal search campaign, and as such, should not be billed by the search engines. To a great extent, the engines claim that they do everything possible to prevent these activities from occurring, but, how can anyone be certain of this? Analysts have stated that fraudulent and unwanted clicks can be as little as 6% or as much as 17% of a search campaign, depending upon the industry vertical concerned. When you consider that the top four engines had a projected income from advertising of $10 billion dollars in 2006, it becomes increasingly obvious that a third party solution was inevitable and desired.
Television has Nielsen and radio has Arbitron. Search has a number of companies that have sprung up in the past two years in light of media interest and potential click fraud-related lawsuits. In 2007, Outrider began a 6 month program of determining the best product for identifying and quantifying click fraud and, after selecting the right one, built a partnership to provide the best of breed in detection at a reasonable cost to our clients. Outrider selected Click Forensics for this purpose. With 2 years experience in the business, a detection system built on heuristic programs that learns from past activities, and an industry presence that allows their President, Tom Cuthbert, to speak on CNBC on a regular basis, Click Forensics was our company of choice.
Outrider’s partnership allows us to provide information regarding unwanted clicks from countries not in our client’s interest, duplicated clicks owing to consumer revisiting websites while searching, as well as fraudulent activity from bots and “click-from-home” scams. We are also able to inform the client if there is, in fact, no threat from click fraud or low-value clicks and that the engines are catching all of the issues on their own.
So, for us, including Click Fraud as part of our offering provides value in allowing our clients to trust our expertise. Using third-party analytical data, like Click Forensics, is how we back up that trust.
Are you for certain that the clicks your clients are paying for are legitimate? If you would like more information on Click Forensics or the “tell-tell” signs of Click Fraud, respond to this post or Contact Us.
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