Pay to Click Fraud - Padding the Numbers

Here is an interesting story I came across that I thought my readers might appreciate. The article was written in Business Week and addresses a clearly growing problem of click fraud. Click fraud is the manipulation of paid to click ads to rack up extra cash for the ad sellers like Yahoo and Google.

Of course both companies claim they have sophisticated formulas and techniques for eliminating bogus clicks, but my question is how do they know what a bogus click is? Who is to say that clicks from China, Egypt, and other countries are not actual real clicks. How do they actually know that a paid group of "professional ad clickers" in Minnesota isn't actually legit. The fact is they don't. They can write formulas that nail some of this activity, but it won't stop all of it because stopping all of it requires they stop recycling ads and become mind readers that can determine a person's intent...two things I don't see in their future.

Some percentage of clicks on recycled ads and other bogus campaigns is always going to get through. It is like tolerating some percentage of corruption from the Mafia, we know it goes on, but since it is such a small percent and spread over lots of victims we can tolerate it. I wonder if everyone of you that use pay to click ads feel this way as well.

The FBI and Postal Service is now investigating this according to the article, but clearly their resources are limited at best and even if they discover a fraud if it is located in another country the actions they can take will also be very limited. In the end there are only two choices you will have available to you...

1. Stop using pay to click advertising and put your marketing dollars in other places.
   
   
2. Police your own pay to click results and report what you believe to be scams.

The first choice is an easy one. The second is bit more problematic as it involves you looking at your click results and trying to determine if the people coming from those clicks would be "real" prospects or scams. Here are a few suggestions to help you determine good clicks from bad ones...

1. Insure that you are getting distributed clicks from a wide area and be suspicious of all activity coming from foreign countries unless that is the target of your campaign.
   
   
2. Use specially designed landing pages for your click through results and measure those pages carefully for the amount of time people spend on the pages and where they go after landing on the pages. Quick hits with very short visits and then leaving again may indicate a scam.
   
   
3. Measure your conversions from ads. Any direct marketing effort needs to be measured against actual results. If you track your numbers and find over time that it takes 200 hits to get one conversion and suddenly you start getting 800 clicks with no conversions and your ads or landing pages haven't changed you better start looking for a scam.
   
   
4. Test your ads against other forms of marketing such as SEO or other online marketing (not pay to click) and see what performs better.

In the end nothing will protect you completely, but careful vigilance and whatever, if anything, that Yahoo and Google does will be your only defense. Here is the link to the article...

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Until next time, watch those clicks!

Michael Temple