Click Fraud 101 - Part 2: Diagnosis, Defense and the SEM’s Outlook
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Written By Reprise Media | May 23, 2006 | Share This
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In Part 1 of Click Fraud 101, we defined click fraud, identified its leading offenders and looked at a couple of the foremost means used to effect the dirty deed. Part 2 examines several ways to determine whether you’re being victimized by click fraud, and if so, exactly how much damage it’s doing. We’ll also share our point of view as search engine marketers.
How to spot a problem
Keeping an eye on click fraud is as simple (and boring) as diligently keeping track of your traffic. The problem generally graduates from a nuisance to a financial burden only with a significant number of clicks, which is lucky, since massive click activity has a hard time flying under the radar if you know what to look for.
- Check your statistics regularly; if you notice a burst of traffic originating from a single IP address over brief period of time, you’re probably looking at click fraud.
- Similarly, you should monitor traffic fluctuations tied to particular keywords. If you have a keyword that usually turns in lukewarm to mediocre performance that suddenly and inexplicably starts to generate an unheard-of number of clicks, you could be dealing with a fraudster trying to artificially drive up your keyword costs.
- Look at your overseas traffic; a spike in clicks coming from other countries can be a click fraud indicator.
- Examine the activity of your visitors after they’ve clicked through. As a rule, if a click is mischievous in nature, the entity doing the clicking isn’t likely to stick around for a few minutes surfing a site.
Although the engines do keep records of fraudulent clicks on their end, it’s a good idea to employ third party tracking applications to keep them honest. Comparing the info you get from the engines to the data you get from something like DART or Atlas Search is a good way to accentuate discrepancies and help you get the click fraud refund you’re entitled to.
Click fraud - the SEM’s take
So what do we think of click fraud? We recognize it as an unfortunate problem that’s unlikely to go away as long as search advertising models stay the way they are. It’s a cost of doing business.
That said, if you manage a campaign to meet conversion goals, keeping an eye on your back end while appreciating the real cost of bringing in a customer, you can whittle down the impact of click fraud to the point where it’s barely an issue.
That might not be a sexy answer, but we’re professionals, here. Efficiency might not always be exciting, but the ‘excitement’ of a click fraud assault is something you can probably live without.
In case you missed it: Part 1
Topics: Click Fraud |