Click Fraud Wired Article Jan - 2006
The Wired article is a good run-down of what is wrong, how the search engines arent helping, how they are still profiting from click fraud and why the threat continues to rise.
Amount of click fraud:
MarketingExperiments.com indepedent research says that as much as 29.5% of all test PPC activity was fraudulent.
The Great Conflict of Interest:
As I have said time and time again there is an inherit conflict of interest when the PPC networks are the sole decider as to whether they will reach into their revenues and give an advertiser back their advertising investments. As Jessie said at SES Chicago, the search engines are keeping hundreds of millions of dollars that they didn't earn due to click fraud.
Detectable click fraud:
A click fraud virus. A hacker who develops a virus with the sole intent of releasing a virus that infects machines around the world, in addition to the machines the hackers already control, to click on PPC ads over and over, billions and billions of times. If/when this happens it could be a turning point in pay per click being a viable business model.
Amount of click fraud:
MarketingExperiments.com indepedent research says that as much as 29.5% of all test PPC activity was fraudulent.
The Great Conflict of Interest:
As I have said time and time again there is an inherit conflict of interest when the PPC networks are the sole decider as to whether they will reach into their revenues and give an advertiser back their advertising investments. As Jessie said at SES Chicago, the search engines are keeping hundreds of millions of dollars that they didn't earn due to click fraud.
Detectable click fraud:
- Competitors click on your ads repeatedly from their office (the PPC networks should catch these)
- Publishers click on your ads repeatedly from their computer/office (the PPC networks should catch these)
- Third world click farms. Not easy to detect as there can be so many people clicking a very broad range of ads where patterns are not easy to detect.
- Hackers. At any given time there are millions of computers all over the web that have been comprised by and under the control of hackers. Hackers are able to direct these machines, with millions of different IP addresses and spread throughout the world, to click on ads running on a spammy blog or web site they had setup with automated software.
- Sploggers. People who use automated software to copy content from all over the web to create fake blogs that can rank in the search engines. Users visit the spamy blog (splog) and click on ads trying to find the content they came looking for.
A click fraud virus. A hacker who develops a virus with the sole intent of releasing a virus that infects machines around the world, in addition to the machines the hackers already control, to click on PPC ads over and over, billions and billions of times. If/when this happens it could be a turning point in pay per click being a viable business model.
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