DeveloperShed senior editor Terri Wells wrote an article about Click Fraud, in which she shows “how” to determine if you’ve been a victim of this new high tech “crime.” In this article we will go into a more detailed and technical discussion of exactly how to determine if you are being victimized by Internet fraud artists.
In Terri’s article, “Click Fraud: What it is, What You Can Do About it”, she gave the following bit of advice: if you want to do the analysis yourself, you need to obtain your website’s server logs. You should be able to get these from your Web hosting company. Once you have them, there are a number of data points to examine. These include the following:
Repetition of IP addresses
A large or irregular number of clicks from the same geographic area
IP addresses that belong to cloaking software companies
A change in the amount of traffic seen for certain keywords, particularly a rapid increase
A doubling or tripling of clickthroughs without any bid changes or rank changes (or, possibly, a corresponding increase in business)
This is not something you can do once and then just forget. Compiling statistical data takes time and effort, but it is the kind of data that Google and Overture will take seriously; you cannot approach them with a suspicion and expect them to listen unless you can back it up with hard data. You should monitor you bids daily, and even review them weekly or monthly. Remember, nobody is going to be as interested in making sure your business succeeds as you.
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