Click fraud

How much will it hurt? What could help?

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"Exposing click fraud", article by c¦net [news.com.com]

About time for counter measures like conversion tracking. What else...?

[Illah]

Frankly this seems like a tough one to stop, especially in the sense of a competitor clicking your AdWords to cost you money. I've been reading up on this and have just been scratching my head. Solutions such as conversion rates would make it hard to differentiate fraud from crappy content, and of course the ability to convert is rather subjective.

I look forward to seeing what is brought to the table to solve this problem. I myself have clicked a competitor ad and laughed that I just cost them a few cents (I only did it once as a joke). How could they possibly stop something like that as long as the fraudster doesn't do it in such volume that it becomes obvious?

--Illah

[Procyon]

It is impossible to totally stop it. No doubting that.

Hopefully the main "players" are caught.

[Lord Majestic]

About time for counter measures like conversion tracking. What else...?

One should certainly use conversion tracking regardless of suspect click fraud. This is not however a solution since malicious competitors can just click you out of promotion and even though you might minimise losses by stopping unprofitable campaigns you will leave the market to them - you might even think its unprofitable business whereas it actually is!