In a statement that reflects the change in the company’s public stance on the issue of click fraud, the company noted in a recent blog post that the “security of Google AdWords advertisers is important to Google, and we have dedicated a number of resources to protect your account against invalid activity.”
Among the initiatives Google has implemented are new detection and filtering techniques, under which each click on an AdWords ad is “examined” by the Google system.
“Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks and various other click patterns,” the company stated. “Our system then analyzes these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports.”
The system serves to “filter out activity fitting a profile of invalid behavior,” such as “excessively repetitive clicks,” and automatically discards clicks and impressions from “known sources of invalid activity.”
Google now has a dedicated click quality team that works with data collected by their automated systems to “glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks,” the company said.
In addition to making life harder on those who generate fraudulent clicks, Google will continue to credit advertisers for clicks that have been verified as fraudulent.
“One of the goals of our team is to make invalid activity very difficult and unrewarding for unethical users, thereby decreasing their chance of success,” the click quality team stated on its blog. “Additionally, if we find that invalid clicks have been charged in the past two months we’ll credit advertisers’ accounts.”
Google’s current line of thinking on click fraud stands in stark contrast to the opinion previously stated by Google CEO Eric Schmidt; last year, Schmidt largely dismissed the problem presented by click fraud and suggested that nothing needed to be done about it.
“Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google and it were rampant,” Schmidt said during an appearance at the SIEPR conference on the Stanford University campus in March 2006. “Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen.”
Part of what changed Schmidt’s mind may have been the outcome of a lawsuit initiated by advertisers against the company — a lawsuit that eventually culminated in Google settling the claims for $90 million.
Recent studies issued by industry analysts suggest that the click fraud problem is larger than Google has admitted to, even now. Google has asserted that the click fraud rate is under 10 percent, and that only 0.02 percent has been declared fraudulent as a result of advertisers’ complaints.
In May, fraud detection specialist Fair Isaac Corp. reported that between 10 and 20 percent of AdWords clicks are fraudulent. A study from search engine marketing firm Click Forensics put the percentage at 14.8 industry-wide for the first quarter of this year, with fraud on ad networks like AdWords and the Yahoo Publisher Network running even higher, at 25.6 percent.
For more information on Google’s efforts to curb click fraud, refer to Google’s Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.
