Along with Tim Walker, I will be blogging live from the Hilton New York which is holding this year's Search Engine Strategies Conference. I'll pass on all the useful pieces of information from each session I attend.
I attended the Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues session at 2:00-3:15 on 3/17. The goal of this session was to discuss all things concerning Click Fraud: what is it, why does it occur, and how do we protect ourselves against it.
Two Main Intentions behind Click Fraud
- Harm other advertisers(Adwords, Google Search Network)
- Make money themselves(Adsense, Google Content Network)
Numerous Methods to commit Click Fraud
- Manual clicking
- Click farms(groups of individual manually clicking on ads)
- Pay to click sites(folks trying to recruit people to click on ads, pyramid-type scheme)
- Click bots(hijacked number of machines) also used for email distributions
- Botnets (variation of click bots)
How does Google protect against click fraud?
- Smartpricing
- Site targeting (2005)
- Site exclusion (2006)
- Invalid clicks report (2006)
- Placement reports (2007)
- IP exclusion (2007)
- Additional Category Exclusions (2008)
The other Providers (Yahoo & MSN), do not have the tools that Google does, so they leave it up to the advertiser to identify irregular click patterns and report it to their Customer Support.
ChannelAdvisor CAManaged Service utilizes all of the Google reports listed above to minimize Invalid Clicks on the Content Network and leverages its agency relationships with all the Engines to resolve all Click Fraud issues in a timely manner.
written by Andrew Belsky -- andrew.belsky at channeladvisor.com
