Jas0n - 2:31 pm on Apr 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Recently I've worked on reconciling my web logs with both Google and Overture click through reports( I use the "referrer=Google?kw=widget" to track referrers).

I found that I usually don't get an exact match with their reported numbers but get pretty close for most keywords if I just filter the referrers so I just get one click per IP address per day (ie. I eliminate multiple referrals for a given IP address on a given day).

We don't have huge PPC traffic overall, and we are somewhat of a niche B2B company, so we don't get as large an amount of traffic from the major ISP's like AOL so that may make my approach work better than it would in other circumstances.

My results seem to suggest that Google and Overture do use some sort of fraud prevention system, although I'm not sure what the exact algorithm is (and they say that their exact technique is "proprietary" so they don't give much in the way of details).

Assuming they are using a fraud prevention algorithm, my philosophy with verifying the click throughs is that close is good enough -- what do you think?

Do you guys actually match them click for click with your logs?