Re: Google Click-Fraud Crackdown

Op 15 Jul 2006 14:56:40 -0700 schreef canadafred:

Jan Paul van de Berg wrote:
Op 15 Jul 2006 06:40:09 -0000 schreef MyTwoCents:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Google's Click-Fraud Crackdown |
| from the fighting-back dept. |
| posted by Zonk on Thursday July 13, @16:05 (Google) |
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/13/1938207 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that Google is making some
effort to [0]put a crack in the practice of click-fraud. Because of the
pernicious abuse of the company's advertising business, it simply can't
be sure that anyone is actually looking at the ads. Bruce Schneier talks
about the problems of ensuring that people are really people, and
Google's solution." From the article: "Google is testing a new
advertising model to deal with click fraud: cost-per-action ads.
Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action:
buys
a product, fills out a survey, whatever. It's a hard model to make work
___
Google would become more of a partner in the final sale instead of an
indifferent displayer of advertising ___ but it's the right security
response to click fraud: Change the rules of the game so that click
fraud
doesn't matter."

I've been doing a lot of pay-per-lead campaigns via website partners.
Because the cost per lead is higher, you want to be able to return the
false response. I don't see Google sending e-mails to advertisers like
"please return you false response before then and then so we can process it
and pay the website partners". So advertisers must be very careful and
calculate the waste in their bid. And also: response fraud is just as easy
as click fraud.

It's about the same with the ppc method Google uses currently. They report
the cost per response if you place a tracking code on your site. But since
your waste is also counted as valid response, you have to keep track of the
actual cost per response yourself. In my case Google reports about EUR 14
per lead while the actual cost is around EUR 19.

I know that perhaps doesn't sound like much but it amounts to 27% of
all the revenue taken from you appears to be generated fraudulently.
Stuffed into a variety of pockets I'm sure.

The reason a response is not valid doesn't mean it's fraudulous
automatically. I choose to have a short response form in order to generate
many responses. A false response can also mean somebody doesn't answer the
phone, doesn't seem to be creditable for the goods bought, cancels
appointments etcetera. I report the non-response to the website partners I
deal directly with every month because we agreed only to pay for the valid
respons (like EUR 20 per valid response). Google doesn't do that but I'm
satisfied with EUR 19 anyway. And I don't want to do the validation in the
site logic because I rather have 73% validity out of 1000 responses than
100% validity out of 150.

What the fraud is in the view-to-click ratio, I don't know. I don't care
either because it's the same principle as the short forms: the easier it is
for website partners to take up my campaign, the more clicks I get. I
rather have 1.000.000 clicks with 90% validity than 100.000 clicks that are
all valid. As long as the average cost per click leads to a raw lead price
of EUR 14, hence EUR 19 net lead price. Having said that, I would welcome
an anti click fraud method, as soon as it doesn't cut down the volume of
valid clicks.
.

Relevant Pages

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