How does G know who we are?

On the internet nobody knows you're a webmaster

[perldiver]

For the purposes of finding out who's clicking on their own ads, how does G identify us and associate us with a website?

I don't maintain my website from the same IP address that its served from. I program and surf from home and my website is professionally hosted literally on the other side of the country from me. My home DSL is not even a static IP address. I work at yet again a different IP address.

So, how does G assess who's clicking on their own ads?

[jomaxx]

Bottom line is that nobody knows any details.

I hate to be a party pooper but I don't think going into the specifics of this sort of thing is appropriate. Helps the fraudsters do their thing but isn't of much value to legitimate webmasters.

[Hobbs]

But still worth a response.
Google is one of the most cash rich companies in the world, with enough prestige and benefits to attract the cream of the cream in computing man power, more importantly rich with traffic data, add now Urchin logs, a registrar so has access to domain info, email provider too, and don't forget the Google Tool bar in IE and now firefox so as not to miss out. That's just for collecting raw data and credentials!

Now add to it their announcements on dedicating much resources to combat click fraud, clicks pattern detection, the will to keep their major source of income pure, and did I say lots of money?

They probably miss many fraudulent clicks, still they don't have to catch them all, I would bet against your odds even with the dynamic IP and 2 locations any time of the day 7 days a week.

[perldiver]

Jomaxx: I agree, I was just curious. It relates to how paranoid us Adsense webmasters should be about things like significant-others, roommates and co-workers.

[cvas]

There are ways still, if you log on to your stats and then surf and click on your ads there's info stored for both actions what is left is just match it.

[Father_of_9]

Trues, your IP address might not be static, BUT aside from your IP address, there is also computer address. Don't tell me you didn't know that.

[perldiver]

Once again (I'm not sure if this came up recently on this forum or the YPN forum) but I do not believe a computer's MAC address can be seen over the internet. Can anyone shed an expert technical opinion on that?

[hunderdown]

They don't need to catch a specific offender to suspect click-fraud. They can look for patterns, or for anomolies.

For example, if a particular ad gets a 2% CTR everywhere except on one site, where it gets a 15% CTR, that's going to look suspicious. Google is an expert at analyzing statistics, so I don't think I can even imagine all the things they could do....

[steve40]

perldiver
I am afraid that with any decent sniffer software mac address that is specific to the nic is there for all to see
steve

[perldiver]

Ah. My point exactly. Sniffer software. But someone who's interacting with the internet with JPO* Windows and Outlook and MSIE is NOT exposing their MAC address to the world.

(*JPO - Just plain old)

[davidof]

> Ah. My point exactly. Sniffer software. But someone who's interacting with the internet with JPO* Windows and Outlook and MSIE is NOT exposing their MAC address to the world.

That is correct. The MAC address will be visible on older type token ring and ethernet local networks but will never go beyond a router. The only things Google has are what is in the IP and TCP headers which comes down to an IP address.

[aeiouy]

For starters they have cookies of you logging into your adsense account. Secondly they can track usage patterns for various ips on sites. It is probably not terribly hard to identify people associated with sites.

Remember google has a huge database of user activity and behavior. They can probably predict what you are going to do next before you do it, with some level of reliability.

They have plenty of ways of knowing. This is why so many people who cheat the system and claim innocence get caught.

Bottom line is google has a lot of tools in their arsenal some of which the bulk of us probably have no idea about...