[adwords.blogspot.com...]
Today, we’re announcing the launch of a new AdWords feature enabling advertisers to have a much more detailed picture of invalid click activity in their account. The metrics of “invalid clicks” and “invalid clicks rate” will show virtually all the invalid clicks affecting an account.These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers’ accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.
[edited by: engine at 8:24 am (utc) on July 26, 2006]
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No one needs to use AdWords
Well, I guess you missed all the online comments that "google ruined my business", or "google ruined my life" connected to the minimum bids...
There are a LOT of sites that can't survive without PPC, because, quite simply, they have such poor business models and poor content they can't get traffic any other way. Clearly the profit margin on free traffic is much better than if you have to pay for marketing, but I guess you haven't experienced that.
I suppose they don't need adwords, because there's always Yahoo, MSN, Miva and the other dreck. But they do indeed need a source of low cost traffic, since they can't rank in the search engines, probably for excellent reasons.
I'd also have thought that for all these needy sites that can't get traffic any other way, they are probably not as concerned about click fraud at 3 cents a click than would other more legit advertisers paying 8 bucks per. Then again, I guess the 3 centers may have tighter margins.
[edited by: mona at 6:20 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]
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There are lots of folks here who seem to "know" exactly how much fraud they're getting. How is that? If you know it so well why aren't you selling your services to other webmasters, or selling your solution to Google et al.?
I was close to (not in a financial way) two click fraud detection services but they tell me that nobody wants their services - in any significant way. One might think every advertiser wants this service, but my assessment is that they don't trust anyone with their click data and would rather lose some money than find out how much it is. By my own limited observation of my own and customer PPC accounts, it is low.
I've managed PPC campaigns for some pretty big names, and some pretty small ones; when we were considering our response to click fraud we wanted to hire a company that would evaluate our traffic for fraud and make a report for us so we knew what we were dealing with. After my own research I found that there are (or were, at the time) exactly zero firms out there that had the know how, scale and ability to measure our traffic. That's a big business opportunity.
If you look at it, Google itself is probably the most competent and capable to do this kind of montioring and detection. So people's idea that hiring some third party without the experience or resources should oversee the whole thing is silly.
Here is a suggestion for some of you bothered by this. Tell Google you think they let too many fraudelent clicks through and then tell them you are going to stop using Adwords and then stop using it. That is a much more effective tactic than just hoping they turn over their fraud detection to a third-party, which is essentially what you do if you are letting them determine what fraud is.
Back to your post, I think you make a very good point. I would suggest people who think the burden should be on Google should just do click-fraud detection themselves and then present that data to Google and use it to negotiate with them. As you said though, there is nobody out there to get to do it. Although that seems like a better overall solution. Why should all publishers pay for this increased click-fraud monitoring if they don't care about it? Seems like the expsense should be carried squarely on the shoulders of those publishers who want to have it.
And if Google does not want to refund you money for clicks you determine invalid and they do not, then you can agree to disagree and part ways.
There are a LOT of sites that can't survive without PPC, because, quite simply, they have such poor business models and poor content they can't get traffic any other way. Clearly the profit margin on free traffic is much better than if you have to pay for marketing, but I guess you haven't experienced that.
And then there are some of us that do very well in each category, and can tell you from personal experience that a well maintained PPC campaign can out perform free traffic any day of the week. There are just some that better comprehend the value of their time. Do I want my number 1 position today? Do I want traffic today? Do I want my profits today? Or would I rather play around in the sandbox for 6 weeks? Time is money where I come from.
[edited by: mona at 6:21 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]
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Why not allow a 3rd party to look at IPs, etc. I bet Arthur Anderson used to be the most capable audit firm...
[edited by: mona at 6:22 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]
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The Internet's leading search engines are teaming up with an advertising trade group to find a better way to identify and measure "click fraud," a scam that has raised doubts about the Web's trustworthiness as a marketing vehicle.The initiative, to be announced Wednesday morning by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, will draw upon the expertise of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- the owners of the top online search engines -- to attack a problem threatening to erode their profits. Combined, the three companies control 86 percent of the lucrative U.S. search engine market, according to comScore Media Metrix.
as was pointed out earlier, google has already demonstrated that their profit margin may be more important than just about anything else, including human rights... or are you not aware of what has been going on in china?
so from a technical standpoint you are probably correct, but will people trust the corporate morality to handle things honestly? the $60 million google wants to "refund" in the click fraud settlement is about $.40 per $100 that advertisers have spent since 2001?... hardly representative of the volume of click fraud involved, by even the most optomistic standards.
since efv has never used adwords(why is he posting on this forum?), we should probably look at authoritative sources for relevant information:
according to the washington post last week: "Amnesty International accused Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on Thursday of violating human rights principles by cooperating with China's efforts to censor the Web... Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, in a statement... The companies "have violated their stated corporate values and policies" in their pursuit of China's booming Internet market, the statement said.
new zealand herald: ""All three companies have, in one way or another, facilitated or colluded in the practice of censorship in China," London-based Amnesty said in a report. "All three companies have demonstrated a disregard for their own internally driven and proclaimed policies. They have made promises ... which they failed to uphold in the face of business opportunities and pressure from the Chinese Government."
If there are other non-risky business models (there's site micro-payments I suppose) I'm not considering, let me know.
I'm in favor of advertisers paying fixed fees to the engines or networks, personally. No click or impression fraud possible. Another option I was reading about last night is paying based on the nth percentile of clicks (or impressions) based on sampled traffic rates. Some of the ISPs use this method for billing their customers. This mitigates the effect of sudden spikes (such as one might get when under a click attack). It doesn't eliminate fraud but lessens the cost of complex rules, etc. to detect and compensate for it.
If you look at it, Google itself is probably the most competent and capable to do this kind of montioring and detection. So people's idea that hiring some third party without the experience or resources should oversee the whole thing is silly.
Actually, this is untrue. There are plenty of companies that deal with large volumes of financial transactions who must deal with the problems of credit card fraud, wire fraud, etc. Furthermore, the problems with click fraud were known long before AdWords was created. However, from the Tuzhilin report, we now know that G was very slow to move on the click fraud problem.
I'm in favor of advertisers paying fixed fees to the engines or networks, personally.
Could you explain a bit on how that might work with fixed fees, limited space on engines, and more people wanting to advertise on, let's say keywords than can bit it a give space?
How is what you are suggesting different from the fee for directory inclusion stuff that yahoo and several other companies tried?
Could you explain a bit on how that might work with fixed fees, limited space on engines, and more people wanting to advertise on, let's say keywords than can bit it a give space?
What limited space? The most popular queries generate tons of results pages. People can bid on position as they do now. The only difference is that instead of bidding on a per click or impression basis, they bid on a time basis.
How is what you are suggesting different from the fee for directory inclusion stuff that yahoo and several other companies tried?
In principle, it's the same; it is applied to sponsored links, not directories or indexes.
I don't suggest that all the engines and networks drop PPC, etc., but that they add fixed fees as an option for people who want maximum control over their spend (ie. can't be drained through invalid clicks or impressions).
What limited space? The most popular queries generate tons of results pages. People can bid on position as they do now. The only difference is that instead of bidding on a per click or impression basis, they bid on a time basis.
Ok. That's certainly another model. As for limited space, yeah, there is, for marketing purposes.
Obviously it's hard to figure out what the economics of something like that would be for a) the engine, and b) the advertiser.
After my own research I found that there are (or were, at the time) exactly zero firms out there that had the know how, scale and ability to measure our traffic. That's a big business opportunity.
I agree to a large extent - there are firms that have the knowhow but not the disk space or CPU power. Millions of clicks daily, if tracked by a tracking service, would create a huge data load - both of storage and analysis.
To analyse the clicks of a single multiple clicker, there would be a process that compares each click with earlier clicks from that apparent IP address. Before declaring a click as invalid, the algorithm will need to know something about that IP address, such as multiple user signatures or a single apparent user; click behaviour, such as my friend who always double-clicks everthing, etc etc.
When one thinks about the databases being read and written to for thousands of ad clickers at any given moment, one can appreciate that certain tasks need to be done as a separate process, probably batch. The sooner such click arbitration is performed, the sooner each click is declared to be valid or otherwise. Thousands of clicks per second would generate tens of thousands of lines of log entries - and a data bank of googol proportions. For how long should such data be kept, for the customers of the click tracking service?
This is possibly a big business opportunity, but my preference is for G/M/Y and the big e-commerce players (eBay, Amazon et al) to jointly fund an independent, not-for-profit body to build such a click arbitration service. It would probably want to be sited on the Columbia river next to the byte farms planned by the major search engines.
This is possibly a big business opportunity, but my preference is for G/M/Y and the big e-commerce players (eBay, Amazon et al) to jointly fund an independent, not-for-profit body to build such a click arbitration service.
The major PPC networks are already talking:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Maybe they are counting $ from the AOL deal, which has a TON of traffic, in there. Maybe it's all the MySpace crap.
All I know is I'm using YPN on a lot of sites now because EPC and CPM went so low on AS.
i'd also be curious where the overhead for developing and implementing this click fraud reporting shows up in the earnings report.
[edited by: mona at 6:38 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]
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This is possibly a big business opportunity, but my preference is for G/M/Y and the big e-commerce players (eBay, Amazon et al) to jointly fund an independent, not-for-profit body to build such a click arbitration service. It would probably want to be sited on the Columbia river next to the byte farms planned by the major search engines.
Large security companies such as McAfee and Symantec also have the infrastructure and understanding of the problem.
i'm with hdpt on this one... adsense is going downhill, in part because advertisers are bailing out of the content network.
Naah, they're just learning to use the site exclusion tool. :-)
Really, they're using exclusion, I don't think so.
I use site exclusion when I advertise on the content network. It's good business to exclude junk sites where the clicks are low quality.
I exclude MFA sites, since my experiments indicate that clicks from those sites are exceedingly poor quality.
