Google is to let clients block certain users from seeing their ads
Google steps up click fraud war
/v3-uk/news/1958026/google-steps-click-fraud-war
02 Mar 2007, Tom Sanders in California , V3
Google is to introduce a new service to its AdWords advertisement management service in April that allows clients to block certain users from seeing their ads.
The move will allow advertisers to further combat click fraud, a phenomenon in which website operators click on ads on their own websites to boost revenues, or click on online ads for their competitors to deplete their marketing budgets.
Controlling who is presented with the advertisements allows a company to prevent them from being seen by competitors.
Click fraud is considered the Achilles heel of pay-per-click advertising. When advertisers are no longer able to rely on the accuracy of the billing system, they are likely to lose faith in the service.
"Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the pay-per-click advertising model is that advertisers can measure the performance of their campaigns extremely accurately," Google stated on a company blog.
"Thus the most important metric that our advertisers and Google are focused on is providing the best possible return on investment."
Google claims that less than 10 per cent of all clicks on its ads are fraudulent, representing roughly $100m in annual advertising fees which are not invoiced.
The company is able to filter out most of these clicks automatically and conducts proactive analysis to weed out any additional false clicks.
Advertisers can also report clicks which they believe have slipped through the filtering system. Google claims that clicks detected this way represent less than 0.02 per cent of all clicks, or $200,000 per year.
The Internet Advertising Agency is currently working on industry standards on click fraud to provide accepted definitions of a fraudulent click. The group's representatives include Ask.com, MSN Search and Yahoo.
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A step in the right direction
Interestingly, Google's release of these numbers seems to be timed with a marked improvement in their filtering effectiveness, as we have measured over the past month. With the recent improvements, their in-house click fraud prevention is leaps and bounds over other search networks, including Yahoo.
That said, their is a new fraud technique that spreading much faster than any of the others and is virtually undetectable to the networks. According to our data, this is growing so rapidly that the current 10% (claimed) may well grow in multiples over coming months. The fact that is almost impossible to detect also presents the question "How much of the claimed 90% valid activity is being incorrectly deemed as valid traffic?".
Our company is studying this new click fraud system and will soon be posting our findings in an article on our web site www.trafficsentry.com
The IP Address blacklisting is more of a PR tactic than anything else. It may be initially effective in some, very simple, competitor click problems, but the new sophisticated fraud techniques all get around this by spreading the clicks over a huge number of dynamic IPs and proxy addresses. Furthermore, any perpetrator using a PC with a dial-up connection would have a different IP address each time they connect.
Again, Google seems to be much less vulnerable to this new technique than their nearest competitor, however, by no means immune to the threat.
Posted by Jeff Howes, 01 Mar 2007