Click fraud is the practice of charging pay-per-click advertisers for fraudulent clicks. Scammers repetitively click on ads or use bot programs to cause a competitor to be overcharged under the pay-per-click model.
“The problem … is that the search providers lack the position and the data to conduct an accurate audit of paid clicks,” Click Forensics President Tom Cuthbert wrote. “The position should be one of an outside, independent third party. This is the approach taken with other media such as television (Nielsen) and radio (Arbitron). The data is lacking because in order to accurately determine the intent of a click, you need to have behavioral data, not just the technical data. Meaning that what a clicker does on the site is just as important as the technical aspects of that click.”
Click Forensics conducted the survey among more than 1,300 online marketers and found that the click fraud rate on big search sites like Google and Yahoo rose 0.7 percent. The company compiles its data into the Click Fraud Index intended to better recognize the spread of click fraud.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s trust and safety manager, disagrees with the methodology of click fraud research, pointing out the flaw that the report doesn’t mention if advertisers were charged for fraudulent clicks.
“The vast majority [of fraudulent clicks] are detected in real time and filtered out before they affect advertiser accounts,” Ghosemajumder told CNET News.com.
Yahoo spokeswoman Gaude Paez agreed.
“One of the most pressing issues our industry faces right now is the lack of common standards and definitions around click fraud — advertisers are faced with numerous conflicting estimates and definitions, often promoted by companies that have a vested interest in selling click fraud solutions,” Paez said.
“For this reason, Yahoo has committed to working with a reputable third party toward building industrywide efforts to combat click fraud, including development of industry-wide definitions of click fraud and a comprehensive list of identified bots.”
To that end, Click Forensics has raised a three-pronged initiative to get the ball rolling to help counteract the problem.
The first step is to create a community of advertisers to pool “resources, information and ideas.” The company has introduced the Click Fraud Index, which makes it easy to share information throughout the industry. The second step is to define the industry standards for what an unwanted click looks like because Click Forensics “Believes that there are certain characteristics or attributes that are common to a large percentage of click fraud.” The final step is to agree on a standard format to submit click fraud reports to search engines so information is processed easily and uniformly.
Recently, companies have sued Google and Yahoo over click fraud allegations, claiming the companies haven’t done enough to combat click fraud aggressively. Yahoo escaped the fate of its rival Google, settling its class-action click fraud case for $5 million in legal fees and promising to institute a variety of anti-click fraud measures. Google settled its case by agreeing to pay $90 million.
