Click fraud at an all-time high
An article published on CNET News, by Stephen Shankland, describes how armies of compromised computers have driven click fraud to an all-time high in Q4 of 2008. The industry average for click fraud rose over 17% according to the latest ratings provided by Click Forensics.
Humans can click on ads, but increasingly fraudsters turn to botnets, the swarms of computers taken over through remote attacks that can do fraudsters’ bidding without computer users’ knowledge.
Botnets were responsible for over a third of all click fraud. Also adding to this mischievous behavior are competing websites clicking to drive up other advertiser’s costs and content publishers looking to earn higher commissions. Based on some comments, it seems advertisers are struggling to understand how defend themselves from click fraud.
One way I do it is by looking at my log files. Because I tag my URLs for tracking purposes, I am able to see where clicks are coming from regardless of syndication. I can tell a Google Adwords click that occurred on their partner Ask.com’s site. If I see numerous clicks coming from a single referrer, especially across a wide variety of expensive keywords, a flag goes up. I investigate the clicks by looking at the IP address, time of the click, etc. If I see 50 clicks from the same IP address within a 30 second period, or if my referrer log shows that the visitor was on my site for less than 1 second, but clicked 20 times, we may be looking at some click fraud. capturing this data and sending it to the proper authorities at that advertiser network is really all you can do. If you can prove it was fraud, I’m certain you can get at least a portion of your money back, as I have done before.
How do you monitor click fraud?
Get the rest of the story over at CNET News
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