|
"Pay-per-click," by far
the most popular form of online advertising, recently came
under fire as charges of rampant "click fraud"
gather steam on the Web.
Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through
sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online
merchants, companies, and professional.
In fact, some estimate that 99% of all Google's revenue
comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations
of click fraud may well rain on Google's otherwise sunny
parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online
advertising practices.
Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it sounds:
advertisers pay for each click on their ad, usually mixed
in among search engine results or displayed on relevant
websites.
"Click fraud" occurs when, for whatever reason,
an ad gets clicked by someone or something (usually an
automated "bot" that simulates clicks) with no
intention of ever buying anything from the advertiser.
The sole intention of click fraud is to simply drain an
advertiser's budget and leave them with nothing to show
but an empty wallet.
Who commits click fraud?
Usually an unscrupulous competitor who wants to break a
rival's bank, online "vandals" who get their
kicks causing other people grief, or search engine
advertising affiliates who want to earn fat commissions by
racking up piles of bogus clicks.
Regardless of who does it or why, click fraud appears to
be a growing problem search engines hope stays under their
advertising clients' radar.
This problem isn't exactly news to the search engine
giants.
In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004,
Google admits that they have "regularly refunded
revenue" to advertisers that was "attributed to
click-through fraud."
Google further states that if they don't find a way to
deal with this problem "these types of fraudulent
activities could hurt our brand."
Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture,
the Web's largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of
click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly
to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon
them over doubts about the veracity of their advertising
charges.
The search engines all claim to carry measures that
identify and detect click fraud, but details about how
they do it and to what extent remain sketchy.
They claim revealing details about security would
compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg
up on circumventing their defenses.
This sounds good, but affords little comfort to
advertisers who feel caught between losing out on their
best traffic sources and paying for advertising that won't
result in revenue.
One way to protect your business against click fraud is to
closely monitor your website statistics.
Look for an unusually high number or regular pattern of
clicks from the same IP address.
If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider
to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website
traffic.
Also, a number of services such as ClickSentinel.com
have sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly
analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively
dispute fraudulent click charges with the search engines.
|
