How Can You Detect Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud?
Each Pay-Per-Click provider offers some sort of internal click fraud detection and monitoring scheme which attempts to filter out fraudulent clicks. They do this to reassure advertisers that they will not be charged excessive click fees for spurious clickthroughs. LookSmart offers a click fraud prevention service that it calls the “TrueLead® Traffic Purification Process” to cull fake clickthroughs.
Monitor and record your web traffic statistics either with a paid service, tracking software or reviewing your service providers built-in stats. Use those statistics to monitor visitor IP address, time and date of the clicks, keywords used and the referring website (full string's from suspicious sites).
Keep track of your advertising spending over time as sudden increases can should set off alarms. Repeated clicks from one IP address spell trouble and some PPC companies have what is called a “frequency cap” which limits the number of clicks you can be charged for from a single IP address. Limit your daily spending by setting up budgets through the PPC provider.
Filter your campaigns by country so that clicks from IP addresses originating outside your chosen advertising countries are not charged to your account. An article on the IndiaTimes web site titled “India's Secret Army of Online Ad Clickers,” describes how people are paid to visit specific web sites and click on PPC ads. India is not the only country with wages low enough to pay people to sit around clicking ads all day. http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/654822.cms
How do Pay-Per-Click advertisers track and measure click fraud? All rely on their server traffic logs and monitoring software to detect and prevent fake clicks. All web servers can detect details about visitors to their sites, including the time and date of clicks, the user's IP address, the user's browser type, the search query term, the web site and ad that resulted in the visit and the listing that received the click.
Google recently agreed to acquire web traffic analytics firm, Urchin, a firm with built in click fraud detection software with automated IP address lookup functions. Whether Google intended to use that feature in monitoring click fraud is not known, but that functionality will come in handy for them.
Some click fraud is perpetrated by users actively evading tracking and monitoring of their fraudulent activities by using proxy servers or anonymizers that mask their IP address, their host, their internet service provider (ISP) and their country of origin by using proxy server relays and other technical trickery. Software created to purposely defraud Pay-Per-Click advertisers incorporates all of these elements to avoid detection. But complex mathematical formulas have been developed to detect fraudsters' actions, even if it doesn't discover their identity. It may be worth using commercially available fraud detection tools if your budget allows. |