Pay-per-click advertisers have often complained that they are paying more than they should for clicks due to illegitimate hits on their links and banners. With sponsored links running anywhere from 50 cents to $10 per click, analysts say the industry is ripe for fraud.
BlowSearch, a metasearch engine that compiles results from more than two dozen other search engines and sorts them by relevancy, claims proprietary real-time anti-fraud tool called Click Defender guarantees all traffic generated from its searches will be legitimate.
In fact, the company is so confident in its technology that it promises to automatically refund advertisers should they find any evidence of fraud.
The underlying promise, according to BlowSearch Vice President of Marketing Joe Holcomb, is better return on investment, a selling point BlowSearch hopes will give it a fighting chance against search giants Google and Yahoo.
“With anti-click fraud technology like this coming into the market, the advertiser has a choice to make,” Holcomb told XBiz. “They can continue to be defrauded or move their ad revenue to a network that can protect them. We believe that the advertiser will make an educated choice.”
According to industry analysts, affiliate fraud, where affiliates click their own links to illegally increase their commissions, is particularly prevalent.
The topic of affiliate fraud came up during a traffic-generating seminar at last week’s Cybernet Expo.
“It certainly raised questions,” Dan from CamZ.com told XBiz of the seminar. “We have spent some $500 a day for the last year [on pay-per-click] and we will be investigating to see if there is some fraud.”
Identifying fraud is extremely difficult, thanks to sophisticated software programs that mimic human behavior.
But BlowSearch’s Click Defender is designed specifically to weed out such automation software by authenticating 20 different points of information that pass between the desktop and server every time a user clicks.
This information passes in combinations that currently cannot be faked by “hit bots,” according to Holcomb.
In April, a group of websites filed suit against search giants Google and Yahoo, among others, complaining that the bogus click stats were costing them tens of thousands of dollars every year and that the search engines were aware of the problem.
“We simply can’t do what Google does, which is to hear and see no evil,” Holcomb said.