* Fighting click fraud
It is estimated that online search in 2005 will generate more than $4 billion through the big search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Great economic news – but hold hard – it is also estimated that as much as 35% of all paid-per-click advertising – worth around $1 billion per year – is fraudulent.
This type of fraud is, not surprisingly, called “click fraud.” It primarily results from competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads to drive up your cost of business and Web site owners clicking on the ads they host to increase their revenue.
Click fraud perpetrators can use humans or “bots” to generate traffic, and the problem is that without much effort on the part of the bad guys it is relatively easy to make click fraud hard to detect. Even so, there are ways to detect when click fraud is being used.
A company that is very active in this market is Optimal IQ, which acts as an independent analyst to identify bogus click traffic. Its ClickForensics system doesn’t just rely on the technical attributes of a Web visitor (IP address, browser ID string, etc.), it also analyzes behavior to see how closely the pattern of clicks conforms to “normal” user browsing.
The ClickForensics Rating Engine acquires your log data either by downloading via SSL or by tagging within your Web site. ClickForensics describes the next part of the process as segregating out certain attributes: “Our first step is to extract paid searches that did not convert. From there, we apply our proprietary algorithm of over 20 dynamic attributes. Behavioral attributes include things like visit depth, viewing pattern, trend analysis and search term value.”
The next step is to produce a report that identifies the click-fraud threat level by term and search provider, with summary and drill-down. Reports are downloadable in either CSV or XML format. The idea is you can submit the report to search engine providers for credit.
ClickForensics also watches for spikes of potentially fraudulent activity and will send e-mail alerts at user-selectable thresholds.
Pricing starts at around $500 per month and is click-volume dependent. If you’re doing a significant amount of advertising online then this is a service you have to check out. The larger your advertising budget, the more you need to make sure that the competition isn’t running up your costs or that a wily site operator isn’t robbing you blind.
Footnote: Optimal IQ’s Web site is horrible. The navigation is poor; the home page is a great example of a “kitchen sink” layout (has no solid focus but it has lots of “stuff”); the hype-to-content ratio is high; and as far as I can determine, nowhere on the site is there an indication of its pricing, which is odd as I think it is actually reasonable.
