How To Hunt Down Click Fraud - Tools for spotting click fraud

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Another option, if you have access to your Web server's log files, is to simply use one of the free tools that are already available. A fantastic one is aWebVisit.

This tool will give you all kinds of information about your visitors. Besides being useful for fraud tracking (simply look for similarities amoung people that don''t stay more than a few seconds and are coming from pay per click engines), this tool provides all kinds of robust user tracking features that can simply make running your site easier. You can see what people are doing, how long they are spending doing it, what their click paths are (which will help with making your site design as efficient for your users as possible) and so on.

If you want, you can find several tools that are like aWebVisit by going to the CGI Resource Index -- Logging and Statistics page. Several of the tools available there will create their own log files instead of relying on your server log file if you don't have access to it. Some of the programs on this site are free, and others come with (usually) a fairly nominal charge.

The benefit to using a program like aWebVisit is all of the other "stuff" you can learn. The minus to such a tool is that you don't have the same level of flexibility in filtering out data that you would if you wrote a PHP program to the specifications I provided earlier. 

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Comments On: How To Hunt Down Click Fraud

· This is a great article. As mentioned some php code would be helpful so that someone...    · I'll have the full blown example code completed in a couple of days for...    · It looks like one of the better things that you can do to prevent click fraud is to...    · For the most part I completely agree with you. However, if you check out the...   >>> Post your comment now!