New Article - Tackling Click Fraud

[thejenn]

Authored by: Daniel Jupp

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jup...ing_click.html

A Snippet:

“I know half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half”. Daniel Jupp, the founder and managing director of PPC management consultancy Top Position, looks at how search portals monitor click fraud and how you can avoid becoming a statistic…

[StupidScript]

Why don't people who write about click fraud take into account the most difficult part of the accounting process: Reconciliation?

It doesn't matter how fast fraudulent activity ramps up, as long as those clicks do not get included in the billing.

It does little good to freak out about what you see in your own log files or your own PPC management interface when the chances are excellent that whatever fraudulent/invalid clicks are discovered by you have already been kept from impacting your accounts. I'm not talking about the lower-tier PPC providers ... they need a kick in the butt ... but with Google, Yahoo or MSN, you can sleep easy knowing that their detection systems are working quite well.

The author cites an example to watch out for that he describes as "clicks from the same IP address using the same keyword in quick succession". Patterns like that are so easily detected that they were among the first to enter the detection systems, a few years ago. Sure you can report that to your PPC provider, but unless it's a lower-tier provider, those extra clicks never made it into your account and you are in for some frustration as you listen in disbelief to the support personnel's repeated claims that the clicks were not charged to you.

Similarly, conversion rates and traffic analysis are very good at indicating how your site is performing, but they are very poor indicators of evidence of fraud. The world changes, and with it web surfers' tastes and behaviors.

I'm sorry to disagree with the article, but it seems more like the last ditch efforts of an industry (click fraud monitoring) as it slides into irrelevance.

[dw1]

Check out AdWatcher - it's software that will track fraud -and- generate nice clean reports you can send to the search engines to recover your lost cash.