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E-book InformationAdvertising "Click Fraud" Rampant Online?
by:
Jim Edwards
© Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved
http://www.thenetreporter.com
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"Pay-per-click," by far the most popular form of online advertising, recently came under fire as charges of rampant "click fraud" gather steam on the Web.
Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online merchants, companies, and professional.
In fact, several estimate that 99% of all Google's revenue comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations of click fraud may well rain on Google's otherwise sunny parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online advertising practices.
Pay-per-click advertising makes exactly what it sounds: advertisers pay for each click on their ad, commonly mixed in among search engine results or displayed on relevant websites.
"Click fraud" occurs when, for some reason, an ad gets clicked by being or thing
(usually an automatic "bot" that simulates clicks) with no purpose of ever purchase
thing
from the advertiser.
The sole purpose of click fraud is to just drain an advertiser's budget and leave them with nothing to show but an empty wallet.
Who commits click fraud?
Usually an unscrupulous challenger who wants to break a rival's bank, online "vandals" who get their kicks deed different folk grief, or search engine advertising affiliates who want to earn fat commissions by painful
up piles of bastard clicks.
Regardless of who makes it or why, click fraud appears to be a growing problem search engines hope stays under their advertising clients' radar.
This problem isn't exactly news to the search engine giants.
In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004, Google admits that they have "regularly refunded revenue" to advertisers that was "attributed to click-through fraud."
Google further states that if they don't find a way to deal with this problem "these types of dishonest activities could hurt our brand."
Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture, the Web's largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon them over doubts just about the truthfulness
of their advertising charges.
The search engines all claim to carry measures that identify and discover click fraud, but details just about how they do it and to what extent remain sketchy.
They claim revealing details just about safety would-be compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg up on circumventing their defenses.
This sounds good, but affords little comfort to advertisers who feel caught between losing out on their better traffic sources and paying for advertising that won't result in revenue.
One way to protect your business against click fraud is to closely monitor your website statistics.
Look for an outstandingly high number or regular pattern of clicks from the same IP address.
If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website traffic.
Also, a number of services such as ClickSentinel.com have sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively dispute dishonest click charges with the search engines.
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