Click Fraud: What it is, What You Can do About it - With These Numbers, Why Do So Few Complain?
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The amount of money invested in this industry attracts fraudsters like bees to honey. Sales from advertiser-paid search results in the U.S. alone were expected to reach more than $3 billion in 2004, after seeing explosive growth in 2003. Nor is it only the size of the market that draws the con artists; it is also the unlikelihood of being caught. Some observers of Google’s lawsuit think the search engine giant is prosecuting the case to hide the fact that their own technology is not up to speed at catching the bad guys.
Until recently, many advertisers have also been hesitant to complain about the problem. Google and Overture (owned by Yahoo), who make the vast majority of their income from advertisers, say that they have teams of people dedicated specifically to fighting the click fraud problem. Such statements might help to reassure an advertiser that click fraud is not happening to them.
A second reason that advertisers hesitate to complain is the sheer technical complexity of the problem – given that some advertisers use up to a million keywords in a campaign, there is a lot of data to crunch. That is not an easy task, even for companies that specialize in analyzing online marketing campaigns and detecting click fraud.
A third reason for the hesitation is the nature of the advertiser’s relationship with the search engines. For the moment, never mind the ads themselves; search engines are the main method used by Web surfers trying to find something on the Internet. Would complaining about this issue jeopardize the website’s listing in the engines? I would like to think that it wouldn’t…but who wants to take that risk?
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