Click Fraud: What it is, What You Can do About it - Click Fraud Detection
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How do search engines and other companies detect click fraud? With software-based methods of click fraud, it can be as simple as analyzing website traffic or surfing behavior. For instance, a page turned every couple of seconds over a period of time would look suspicious and get flagged as potentially fraudulent.
If there are humans at the other end rather than bots, click fraud can be trickier to detect. In that case, you could be dealing with a wide network of people using different computers across many parts of the world. This behavior will not yield a steady pattern that can be found easily with data mining. It is definitely occurring, however; at least one advertising technology company found click fraud operations in China. Additionally, the India Times reported that some companies are hiring locals to click paid ads from home, and offering them $100 to $200 per month.
Overture and Google use technology that evaluates clicks based on up to 50 data points. For example, while Overture states that it has two patents pending on its technology (so it does not wish to reveal too many details about it), the list of data points it evaluates include:
- IP address
- User session information
- User cookie information
- The network to which an IP address belongs
- The user’s browser information
- The search term requested
- The time of the click
- The rank of the advertiser’s listing
- The bid of the advertiser’s listing
- The time of the search
- The time of the click
How can you determine whether you are a victim of click fraud? Sometimes it is as simple as comparing the numbers. For instance, in the case of one online insurance consulting business using Google and Overture, the business owner noticed a discrepancy after eight months: someone was clicking on his ads at a rate more than 20 times the frequency of a person looking for a quote. He estimated that that instance of click fraud alone was costing him as much as $300 per month. If you cannot do this yourself, there are a number of companies, such as Clicklabs, WhosClickingWho, ClickAssurance, and others, who will perform the analysis for you, charging a fee likely to be significantly less than you are losing from fraud.
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