"Google auditing itself is about the equivalent of Enron or MCI auditing their own holdings. You can see a definite conflict of interest since PPC is a major revenue backbone/lifeblood for GOOG on the exchange floor."-SeoMike Search Engine Watch Forums"If fraudulent clicks are not detected the affected advertisers may experience a reduced return on their investment (and) could lead the advertisers to become dissatisfied with our advertising programs, which could lead to loss of advertisers and revenue."-
Google Quartlery Report for June 2004Fraud: Obtaining money or property by false pretenses.Search engine pay per click networks owned by Google and Yahoo! have created an unbelievable revenue stream for themselves, and a huge nightmare.
A secretive nature must exist to protect their search algorithims, which keep them in business and their investors happy, from spammers that would degrade their search results and threaten their business models. It is this same nature, however, not spammers, that is the biggest threat to their new lucrative revenue streams.
The search engines claim that they cant divulge their fraud monitoring practices and methodologies because then the fraudsters would know how they try to monitoring fraudulent activity. Whats even worse, the search engines do not provide, in their client advertising reporting, any information that is identifiable to a particular visitor or group of visits. You have no way of knowing:
- Who is clicking on your ads?
- How often are they clicking your ads?
- What querys are they using?
The search engines keep all of the data for themselves and do not share much of the identifiable and trendable information to you* that would empower you to fully understand and know what is happening with your search engine advertising dollars.
*
While server logs capture a good amount of data, it is raw and incapable of providing you adequate trend analysis, dynamic IP tracking and does not provide real time alerting to possible fraud activity as it happens.Their are two main types of search engine pay per click fraud:
1. A publisher, or third party on the publisher's behalf, clicks on your ads that the publisher runs on their site with the sole purpose to generate revenue for themselves with no chance of a conversion for you.
2. Your competitor, or third party on the competitor's behalf, clicks on your ads with the intent to drive your advertising costs up (cost per acquisition) to the point that you are either driven out or forced to reduce your exposure.
It is estimated that as much as 20% of all search engine pay per click advertising is fraudulent. However, for certain industries, such as retail, it could be as high as 20-50%.
With fraud costing estimated hundreds of millions of dollars and with the search engines not being forthcoming with the data to allow you to monitor your online advertising there is a need for third party search engine pay per click auditing services.
Third party auditing services, such as
VeriClix (beta), are rather inexpensive and provide the crucial, real time analysis and alerting that the search engines refuse to provide themselves. These services can monitor all PPC activity in your PPC campaigns and track:
- All PPC visitors by their IP address, even across multiple dynamic IP addresses
- The search queries used
- The ad that was clicked
- The landing page that was visited
- The browser type and version (user agent)
- And the date and time
This real-time reporting empowers you to take full control of your PPC advertising campaigns and provides you with the data to take to your PPC advertising reps and ask for an investigation. The need for third party auditing is as viable as traditional accounting audting firms we see monitoring for publicly traded companies.
Additinal information:
More On Click Fraud, The Lawsuit & The Need For Third Party AuditorsClick Fraud: Problem and Paranoia Click Fraud In the SpotlightHigh Noon for Click Fraud
