Click Fraud Still an Expensive Problem - Defining Click Fraud
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Click fraud is defined by Wikipedia as "a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link." The problem with detecting click fraud should be obvious: how do you tell the intention of the clicker just from the actions traced in a web log?
In some cases you can spot robot software or zombie computers clicking repeatedly on ads. But when the bots are programmed to behave in a "human" manner it gets trickier. In some parts of the world you can even find ads running in newspapers for people to make money by clicking on ads online, which further clouds the issue.
And then there are the reporters. In mid-October the New York Times published an article by Adam Liptak titled "Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click." For someone familiar with the pay-per-click industry, there were relatively few surprises. He did list a useful site I hadn't heard of before: CyberWyre, which features a list of the highest paying (or most expensive) search terms on the web.
He pointed out that "mesothelioma," a kind of cancer one gets from inhaling asbestos, is going for a premium. Advertisers who use that word in their pay-per-click ads pay $50 and $60 per click, and often more. His article discussed the fact that lawyers are now using pay-per-click to attract clients for relatively easy and lucrative cases. One of the people he interviewed indicated that it was a sign that PPC had become a mature tool because "Lawyers are usually the slowest to adopt any form of new technology."
All of this is interesting, but why am I mentioning it? It's the tag line of the article that stopped me short. Every time you click on a sponsored link, you cost someone money - and if you're a reporter researching an article, you can cost advertisers quite a bit of money. "This had not occurred to me," Liptak admitted. "In working on this column, I looked at a bunch of lawyers' web sites, at a cumulative cost to them of, oh, $1,000. Sorry." This is a legitimate reporter working on a legitimate article that was published in a legitimate newspaper - but he clearly had no personal interest in whatever the lawyers were offering. So, do his clicks amount to click fraud? Perhaps this is a small problem - but with the number of reporters in the world, to say nothing of all the bloggers who take their craft seriously, who can say?
Next: Google's Response to Click Fraud >>
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