Here's a bit of the text.
...He happily paid Google a few cents for every referral, believing that anyone who clicked through to his site from Google was a likely customer. But then he attended a conference in Las Vegas, and he noticed something strange: the number of Google referrals he was getting dropped dramatically, only to rise again once the conference was over.Joe Blow became convinced the "missing clicks" weren't from customers but from his competitors, who had been in Vegas with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.
Blah, blah, blah...
Which brings us back to Joe Blow. As a result of his experience, he got out of the trade exhibition business, believing that click-fraud detection would be a more lucrative field. He now sells software under the name x?x?x? that promises to solve click fraud for Google advertisers, first by sending "we know who you are" messages back to fraudulent clickers, and then by compiling click dossiers to help fraud victims reclaim their money from Google.
I went to this guy's site to see what he's offering. Basically you just add some javascript to your landing page and then add a string to you URL in AdWords Or Over, etc. It's an expensive service for what appears to be a very simple procedure.
This got me to thinking. Why doesn't Google or Yahoo offer this service for free to their advertisers? It seems like a no brainer. If one person is clicking on your ads 20 times a day then we should know.
The PPC's have this info - Why is it not available to us in the reports? It's far to complicated for the average advertiser to wade through their web logs to find this even if the info is available there.
Yeah, click fraud is a big issue but people that have the detailed information do not like to talk about it! Not a surprise though...
Can you imagine Google, Y! or anyone else launched a new click fraud service?
Do you want to see how much of your budget goes to fraud, how much money we've made from you that wasn't from legit clicks, how much our partners have made from you? Pay us an additional $.01 per click to audit our own data and give you a refund on clicks we've charged you for that weren't legit.
If G offered click fraud detection on Y! or MSN or Y! on G or MSN or MSN on Y! & G, that could get interesting. If MSN pulled a service like that out of their hat and had good detection themselves, they might be able to sway more advertisers to spend more on MSN search traffic. It probably wouldn't get more consumers to use their engine though.
If any one engine offered something like that to detect fraud on other engines (AskJ - need some press and buzz?)and played the press correctly it would be amazing PR but probably bring down the whole sector (or lead to better fraud detection) in the long run.
They already offer conversion tracking.
Click tracking is just the next step.
The fly in the ointment is the whole privacy issue.
There would probably be an uproar if they started offering it even though it's readily available in the open market and most large well known sites already do it.
Hopefully the possible danger to the PPC system as a whole will force them to offer this service in spite of the PR problems.
