Click Fraud Still an Expensive Problem - Google's Response to Click Fraud
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So what does Google have to say about these disturbing figures? For that we need to turn to Shuman Ghosemajumder, the search engine's senior product manager and, according to Forbes, "resident click-fraud czar." He insists that third-party auditors such as Click Forensics deliver inflated click fraud numbers, in part because they count "fictitious clicks" in their estimates, clicks that Google does not count. They also don't take into account Google's own efforts to detect click fraud; instead, they "estimate the amount of click fraud that's being attempted, not how much is going undetected and is charged to advertisers. That means they're counting the clicks that we throw away as invalid, not just the ones advertisers pay for."
Ghosemajumder also notes that click fraud numbers reported by third-party auditors are all over the place; some estimates are as low as less than one percent, while others are as high as 15 percent. That makes it hard to know who to trust. But why should we trust Google when they say the problem is not as bad as the auditors make it out to be? Ghosemajumder points to one reason: "You need a lot of data to do any sort of statistical analysis, and auditors don't have nearly as much as we do."
So what exactly does Google see that the third-party auditors don't? Ghosemajumder explains that it is "impression data - not just when the ads are clicked, but how often they're viewed...Since we know exactly how many times an ad appears, we have much more data than the third-party auditors for any given advertiser."
In his interview with Forbes, Ghosemajumder also argued that, contrary to popular opinion, Google does not have an incentive to ignore click fraud because of the extra revenue it generates. Google itself is a publisher, after all, and gets all the revenue for the ads that appear on Google.com. If there are bad publishers in the system, advertisers will pay less to runs ads in the system, because of the decrease in the return on their investment. Ultimately that means less money for Google. "It also means the clicks on Google.com make less money for us," Ghosemajumder notes.
But when Ghosemajumder is asked whether the search engine has seen an increase in click fraud in recent months, he becomes evasive, explaining that it's difficult to measure. He does state that the number of cases in which Google has refunded advertisers for click fraud has remained stable, but that's hardly an answer to the question unless you assume Google is infallible at spotting click fraud.
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