Fighting With Click Frauds

Category: Internet Marketing — Kenny Tran @ 5:21 pm — post

Saturday, October 13, 2007

First, we need to identify and track examples of click frauds to eradicate the problem. Click fraud is a huge drain on the resources of advertisers operating on both national and international scale. It is estimated to occupy about 30% of all pay-per-click advertising spend. With so much at stake, we’re not surprised to see that the search engines investing so much time and effort into devising solutions.

Introducing IP address repetition algorithms is one method the Search Engines and other pay-per-click programme providers use to reduce growing click fraud problem. These formulae are built to find out suspicious click patterns emanating from a singular IP address. This is useful in uncovering the existence of click farms and tracking potential fraudsters at source as well. Nevertheless, this method of attempting to identify the fraudsters has some problems. Firstly, fraudsters logging on Internet through a dialup modem, DSL line or cable modem can almost completely pass this check because every new online session generates a new IP address. Moreover, there is a lot of software available to adjust IP addresses, which again aimed to “cheat” the algorithm.

Other methods by which search engines can attempt to detect potential fraudulent activity are cookie and session tracking, but again there are ways around these for the fraudsters.

More comprehensive software is being designed which describes and reports on the browsing habits of each click-through to help companies to track and monitor questionable behaviour, although this may be seen by many as intrusive and ineffective because anything on a small scale is still likely to go unnoticed, based on the vast coverage of ads across the internet.

There are a number of self-help approaches that can be implemented to keep an organization out of trouble. The first of these remedies is the reliance on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and organic listings. If a site is good and fully optimized, it could eventually realize a ranking for that another site is willing to pay $2.50 a click. Similarly, with organically high rankings, there is no click through rates; hence the costs associated with pay-per-click are not applicable. Although the process is significantly more laborious and takes considerable time to be successful, the SEO process is much more economical in the long run. With an anticipated 25-30% of all clicks being performed fraudulently, an organically high listing can save money which would otherwise be wasted by click fraud for more beneficial reinvestment.

Year over year, as the pay-per-click advertising market keeps growing and expanding, certainly click fraud will follow suit. Unless an effective means of stopping click fraud is developed and successfully implemented, buyers will steadily lose confidence in the advertising medium and turn to more effective, less wasteful marketing methods, which would critically hit the search engines and could potentially threaten the online economy as a whole.

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