inbound - 12:11 pm on Oct 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here's a click fraud example that I have seen time and time again:

Take a VERY successful (and legally questionable) music/movie download site and slap random high value text ads on it (knowing that the tech savvy users will click occasionally to support the running of the site). Source the adverts from several 'search partners' to reduce the amount of clicks going through each account (since many search partners have 'networks' of their own and are only too happy to take any traffic). Know that these search partners are unlikely to be dumped by the originator of the adverts, if they are dumped there are plenty more to move on to. Be prepared for the gravy train to stop at some point (but know that one network - not neccessarily tied to aone of the big 3 - will still take you through desperation)

We have had first hand experience of the 'networks' that can grow under one questionable partner, leading to many branches on the click fraud tree.

A major problem for Yahoo, or any PPC network, is that once you allow 'search partners' you need to keep a good eye on them, and that also means keeping a good eye on how they keep an eye on their 'partners' etc...

We've seen a lot of eye-popping stuff because we are very close to one of the better Yahoo search parners, and in fact a partner of theirs (making us 2 steps away from Yahoo). We monitor things with almost a religious enthusiasm (and we don't have any partners of our own to look after) and because of this have been asked to help identify click fraud on a small part of the Yahoo 'search partner' network (which is very time consuming given the amount of techniques employed).

It's a complex problem with what should be a simple solution. Each direct partner should be responsible for fraud on their downstream network, if they can't control it then they should be dumped. The problem with this is that, contractually, it is difficult to do (as often the proof is hard to find several layers down).

Maybe Yahoo should take the monetary savings it's making from reducing human input into YSM reviews and employ more click fraud experts to root out the bad apples.