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I'm seriously interested in hearing what other overture users have to say about this.
2. I cannot see that Overture partners are going to bother with click-fraud; it is just too stupid to risk. Affiliates who did this would run the risk of Overture closing their accounts and refusing to pay any money owed. On a million searches per month minimum, that's no small amount of cash. I run a PPC affiliate site and wouldn't dream of jeopardising the relationship.
3. This seems the most likely source to me, especially for high value clicks. It is not unheard of for competitors to try to bully people out of the top listings by using up their accounts really quickly. However, there are supposed to be some measures in place to stop this and you may be able to reclaim most of the money. BUT, I don't suppose Overture are in any great hurry to refund clicks, nor to detect too much fraud.
4. These will only account for a very small proportion of clicks, and this isn't actually fraudulent, since they are clicking on the links to see who is paying. It is, of course, not what you intended the listing for though.
I just wrapped up a 6 month campaign for one client and did a final analyisis. It was common for Overture to automatically detect fraudulant clicks that we hadn't even suspected.
Is it perfect? No -- what is, after all. But their fraud detection is strong enough that you can get a good ROI from a campaign, and that's what matters.
There is no automation in your competitor clicking on your link, and I am always amazed how knuckleheads like that have the time to do that sort of thing.
More to the point if you can trace them through their IP address how dumb are they? The onus isn't on Overture or whoever the PPC is to not charge you if your competitor is playing silly games, they don't know the politics of it all.
I know competitors click on links, sometimes it's because they want to see your linking strategy, you should be flattered that they have the inclination to adopt these tactics. They won't be your competitors long if they sit all day clicking your ads, instead of following up on sales enquiries and the like.
You have to build into your numbers a factor for "duds" and competitors go in the "duds" in my book.
While both Google Ad Words and Espotting have failed completely to filter (m)any "bad clicks" (you sometimes get the impression they donīt have any filters at all), Overture did quite well. You can of course never be sure when it comes down to a handfull of clicks - and I really donīt see how you should filter those - but so far Overture seems to have quite powerfull and satisfactory filters.
I donīt have that much sympathy for Overture in general. But in this area, they are the head of the herd, in my opinion.
The advertiser should have the option of turning off partners.
Show up in my logs as multiple hits from different PPC vehicles and affiliates within a few minutes from the same dial-up IP. A little while later, a different IP and another run through all the PPC engines usually with referrers like www3.overture.com/d/sr then www5.overture.com/d/sr etc., etc.
I reported this to Overture years ago.
Anyone want an exact sample of the logs I'm saving them. Who knows I may sue the b*st*ds that are doing this one day when I've got nothing better to do.
You know who you are ;)
