Click Fraud

Yahoo Click Fraud Investigation

[Total Marketing]

We are a long time Overture/Yahoo advertiser. We recently requested Yahoo invesitgate suspected click fraud on some of the keywords that we bid on which had some unusual activity. Yahoo is demanding that we turn over all of our web server logs for the time period in question before they will investigate.

Am I missing something or does this seem somewhat unreasonable? What relevant info could there be on our logs that they cannot get from their logs? And what does this say about Yahoo's ability to detect click fraud if they cannot do it without the advertiser's logs?

[werty]

This is standard procedure. If you are not willing to give up your logs, you can give detailed reports if you have them. Years ago I ran into the problem where the client would not allow me to release the logs, but they did allow me to run a report which I was able to show all of the clicks that day that stayed on the site for 2 seconds or under.

I think click fraud may be a bit more complex these days, but when I did that it showed that our account was depleted in about 2 hours per day for 2 days, both on a weekend on 2 keywords, instead of 30 days and thousands of keywords.

The worst part of this was that my account was drained, and that the credit went to the following month. So I had about 5 days of use in month one, and then click fraud, then about 3 weeks of zero budget/traffic, then double the budget the next month once the credit was applied.

[OvertureRep]

TotalMarketing,

You raise a very good question, so I'd like to jump in here and provide some clarification. Yahoo! Search Marketing's Click Protection System that was designed to detect a range of invalid clicks so that we can attempt to prevent our advertisers from being charged for these invalid clicks. That said, advertisers often have valuable information on their individual server logs which can assist in the detection of invalid clicks. For example, information about the amount of time a user spends on your site and the number of pages within your site that are navigated is valuable to our click protection efforts. This type of information is proprietary to each advertiser, which is why we encourage our advertisers to share that information with us to help identify invalid clicks.

I hope this addresses your concern. If you have any additional questions specific to your case, please feel free to stickymail me anytime.
- YahooSarah

[StupidScript]

It is a pretty tricky task that really can't be accomplished without the server logs, or at least a listing of suspect entries. Consider ...

1) Yahoo reports 500 clicks on a term
2) Your logs show 520 clicks on that term
3) You identify 40 potentially fraudulent clicks

Did they already account for the 40 fraud clicks and only ding your campaign for 480 clicks? Maybe 460 clicks? Daily reporting is not always the same as what is actually billed, in the end.

Did their system already remove the 40 fraudulent clicks from your billing and your log files are reflecting extra page reloads/re-requests?

Without the log files or log file snippets, there's simply no way to reconcile the accounting.

And, werty:

click fraud may be a bit more complex these days

LOL! I believe that's an award-winning understatement. ;)

[bostonseo]

I'm guessing you saw a huge decline in conversion which is what prompted you to ask them to investigate it as click fraud? One way to 'handle' Yahoo's uncooperative behavior is to pause that term(s) so a couple of days to demonstrate that you mean business...that you are not a pushover.

I've done these a number of times and let's just say it's been worthwhile. You have to be tough with Yahoo and Google.

[StupidScript]

I'm struck by the thought that _if_ Google and Yahoo actually do have anti-click fraud programs in place as they proclaim, _and_ are actively using them, why _not_ tell the advertisers which clicks they detected and didn't add to the bill, each month?

Where's the harm in that?

Frankly, it would give me a lot more confidence in their ability to detect and account for fraudulent clicks.

[techrealm]

why _not_ tell the advertisers which clicks they detected

Or if they feel that is just feeding the fraud operators more info on their systems. Then how about feeding a apache module /script to ban known bad clicks in the "clickstream" from even reaching my servers. If they know for a fact a visitor is attempting to defraud me they should be obligated to inform me that so I can save bandwidth sales team time etc.

As for elaborate fraud schemes, I dont know how many catalogs we have sent out to various countries with 0 sales but its in the thousands. And 90% arrived to our site via ppc... It doesnt take algo to see this relationship.

[RailMan]

i've asked overture to investigate click fraud a couple of times and they've investigated and credited my account accordingly.

i've provided extracts from the logs - just the relevant rows showing referer / IP / browser tag / etc etc etc etc etc - no need to send several meg of data

[StupidScript]

I could understand not releasing click fraud data to the world ... but how about simply releasing it to advertisers who are affected, so they can complete their accounting? It's amazing that something as important as this is being hidden from those it affects the most. They don't need to reveal processes, just the end result.

If Ford can be compelled to inform customers about a safety problem and forced to issue recall notices for products that rarely exceed $30,000 in value, and if California can compel credit bureaus to notify customers when data may have been compromised even if the customer has only a few dollars at risk, then it would seem that legislation is around the corner to compel PPC vendors to disclose the cost of fraudulent clicks to their advertisers who often spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars with them each year.

It shouldn't be a 'hidden' cost of doing business with them.

[crown]

But all this is not the worst of it.
Recently, i was going through my logs, and noticed a huge amount of traffic from a website. I checked it out, and all the website contains is a list of Overture adverts. Now, this can hardly be called a valuable or even "decent" website. So, I turned off my "content" adverts and waited. Checking the logs the next day, I saw that still the majority of my expenditure was coming form this spam-like website. So I contacted yahoo, and all they told me was that the website in questioned was approved, and part of their "search" network! I mean, the website in question does not even have a search engine built into it; all it is, is a list of adverts of expensive keywords, cleverly hidden to seem like a directory. I'm very distressed by this situation, because obviously whoever is approving websites at yahoo is obviously completely incompetent. This put me in a troublesome situation, because the traffic from Overture is quite good, but I do not want to be paying for clicks from a website that basically makes me vomit. Why is it that I cannot exclude websites like on AdWords? The answer from Overture support was simply: "i'm sorry sir, but we do not have that facility in place for our service."
Now, I’m confronted with the difficult decision of: Completely stop all my Overture activity, loosing a substantial amount of traffic; or I swallow the cost of the obvious click-fraud-like activity. Well, I have decided. I am a man of high moral standards. I would rather loose the overture traffic than have to pay for something almost maliciously evil. In the end I think it will be alright because the money I save by ditching overture I can pour into AdWords, and I’m quite sure I will manage to recover the loss of traffic. At least with AdWords I can opt-out of something I don’t want. Overture is just extortion.

[Tropical Island]

whoever is approving websites at yahoo is obviously completely incompetent.

Or just greedy. Over / Yahoo has been losing prime traffic for a couple of years. They have replaced it with a broad interpretation of your keywords and adding type-in domains with nothing but paid listings into their search network.

It will get worse as they completely lose MSN.