Click Fraud Common Sense
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Written By Reprise Media | June 21, 2005 | Share This
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Click fraud is the subject of a nice piece by Tom Hespos appearing in MediaPost today. In it Hespos takes aim at advertiser fears by encouraging them to look at the issue in a more objective light.
The same accountability that has provided such a draw for the interactive medium over the years has also been used to create a de facto double standard. This double standard puts unfair emphasis on click fraud and its associated ills while downplaying the same type of accountability issues inherent in other media - circulation scandals at newspapers, TV news report fact-checking, etc.
Hespos says that:
“As we employ technological controls to cut down on fraud in interactive media, there are those who would seek to circumvent it…It’s a constant arms race with no end in sight.”
He’s right, though we’d also like to point out that in addition to managing against click fraud, it’s also import to manage to a metric as part of the overall campaign strategy.
While fraudulent clicks will always exist, if advertisers are managing to a metric and proactively monitoring their campaigns for signs of click fraud (multiple hits from a single IP, large volume of clicks over a very short time period, etc.) then much can be done to lessen its impact.
That said, tracking can only do so much and only for the most obvious and detectable instances of fraud. More advanced forms, such as “human” click fraud (click on a competitors ads, trying to increase your revenue share from Google, etc.) will only increase as AdSense and related programs grow in popularity. It’s up to the engines to go after the SEMs, advertisers, and publishers who are taking part and right now they have no real incentive to do so.
On another click fraud-related note, check out this article in the Village Voice about an art installation called “Google Will Eat Itself” that wants to deconstruct global advertising mechanisms, one click at a time.
Here’s a quote from their theory page:
“We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end we will own it!”
Ummm… OK. Send us an invite to your takeover party. We’ll be there with our tin-foil hats.
Topics: Click Fraud |