Debbie Does Click Fraud

Well I probably shouldn't have been surprised but it seems that some pornography sites are taking click fraud to a new level, one that can go as far as to degrade a brand or company name ontop of taking advertiser's dollars.

Kessler International went undercover for 6 months and found pornography sites that were using pornographic pictures who's links were tied to PPC advertising sites - and not in the fetish kind of way. Basically clicking on one of these images took you to an advertisers site instead of more pornographic pictures. So you went to click on an image of Debbie and you might have wound up at Disney [shudder].

This is another example of how we can expect click fraud to grow and adapt. SEMPO last year said click fraud was estimated at $800 million dollars, which probably puts it into the billions by now. With that lucrative of a target for fraud why assume that:
1)It can't happen to you
2)It isn't already happening to you and
3) The PPC networks and search engines don't need help

Look into click fraud detection, auditing and monitoring services folks. Although I cant understand why you would want to pay for one, but get one even if you do pay.

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:

• 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)

Not-so-detectable click fraud:

• 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.

PPC Armageddon:
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.