Forum Moderators: open
Any thoughts?
Give me a couple of hours and I'll give you a complete answer.
Find what has "pathetic" fraud protection, and the majority of the fraud seems to be coming from a major partner, advertising.com....
I found the fraud, not Findwhat.. I kept seeing very strange UA's in my NoRefer logs for a casino client. Turned out that Advertising.com had programmed bots to run on their local servers that would simulate click throughs in their network, that would then rack up charges on Findwhat accounts...
Findwhat did handle the situation on my end at least.. They credited the account over $200 for the "bogus" clicks.. But I'm starting to see them again, in another vertical market...
Aside from that, I don't know a lot about findwhat.com, they do have a partnership deal with hotbar, which is a browser plug in, and through that, they have distributed their listings to a large number of users...I don't know that people actually click through from there, but i would call that pretty successful market penetration.
Han Solo
BUT, I'm still getting bogus clicks on another account, so they haven't terminated the relationship with advertising.com at this point...
Why can't these people at least be creative when they try to hijack stuff? I mean really, it's not like there aren't public domain spiders they can't run off proxies...libwww comes to mind, the moma spider, and some perl utilities...
I wish I knew how those hackers brought down Yahoo and MSN a while back with annonymous dos's...these guys deserve something nasty...any thoughts?
(I really am a nice guy, I just don't like it when people lie to me while their hand is in the cookie jar. Especially my cookie jar. ;) )
Cheers,
Han Solo
yup I found them coming in as [127.0.0.1:880...]
I am looking into another findwhat issue as well.
It's been 24 hours since I asked them to respond to an a question.
We have used findwhat for about a year.
The client panel interface is easy to use. [Stalls in NS because of a tables problem in NS we think]
We find that they do provide quality targeted traffic.
They have an advertising budget. [A key to any PPC type firm]
In most cases the price is very good compared to goto.
They do have a relevancy review process and will remove terms.
Their customer service has been excellent.
On the issue of spam clicks, you do have to contact them. They do not contact you.
We have been issued a credit in 24 hours. They continued to look at the issue an gave us another credit about a week later. This covers the honesty issue.
However:
In the process of KW research / mining I have discovered the findwhat.com and a sister company are bidding in the open on certain KWs. It is in the open but costs them nothing and has the effect of raising the bidding on some very competitive terms. I have brought this to their attention. In my personal opinion this is not quite right.
If I bid on the phrase, "mortgage rates", I don't expect to be charged for a click through on the search, "bank of america mortgage rates", especially at $1.00 + for the keyword phrase...
A Findwhat VP generally alluded to crediting our account for the "bogus" clicks, and when I wouldn't play ball, they discontinued any further discussion. They did remove the technology from those specific searches (which in my mind indicates they knew they were in the wrong), but they are actively serving these same unrelevant click throughs on a majority of keyword searches, and charging advertisers for clicks on keyword phrases, they didn't bid on...
On another note: we have kept our Findwhat accounts open, through all of this, as they have generated some traffic at economical expense. But, we have pretty much shut down or limited our exposure in broad, competitive verticals at FindWhat...
IMO (personal opinion only, I am not a lawyer.), it would take full disclosure of the practice to anyone that signs up as a bidder to be "in the open" on this. The fact that you, a seasoned pro at ppc had to discover this while mining/researching seems to indicate that FindWhat and its sister company haven't adequately informed those they are bidding against.
Bidding as a shill to drive up the price is a time-honored auction practice. Didn't someone get arrested or sued in California for shilling a painting they had on eBay?
shill [dictionary.com] (shl) Slang
n.
One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.
I want to state that FindWhat's customer service group is second to none in the PPC game.. They are miles ahead of Goto, and are willing to help you in any way possible.
Luis said they are still evaluating the advertising.com situation, and haven't made a final decision. They are still monitoring for "bogus" clicks. I exclaimed that it can't be good for PR to be associated with advertising.com, and Luis replied that it was another group at Findwhat that had initiated the partnership. Basically, the CS group is playing "damage control", and interfacing with their technical group.
I did bring up the situation about being charged for click throughs on searches that advertisers are not bidding on, and Luis tried to gravitate away from that topic of discussion, merely stating that Findwhat's advertisers had not complained about it... I doubt many advertisers dig into referring data like "our kind" does?? :)
The CS group is the main reason we have left accounts active at FindWhat, but I told him if they had their house in order, we would have added many more new accounts into their system... Both Luis/Alissa should be commended on their professional attitude they reflect towards advertisers.
213.140.12.122 [127.0.0.1:880...]
I am still pondering what to do about this, other than getting a refund for all of the clicks...also, i took a look at their financials, to see how they are doing.
Would you believe on their last filing, they had incomes of 400,000 on expenses of 4 million? At that rate, they'll be out of business by Febuary...I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting my money as fast as I can...I don't want to be in line with the rest of the masses when things get really ugly.
All this aside, though, they are a good company. I mean, in as far as the business dealings I've had, except for this, they've been great.
Cheers,
Han Solo
There are two (or more) issues presented in this thread, and -if Findwhat or any other ppc engine is employing them- I can't see where running the search locally allays the concern.
1) Expanding the search term beyond the one selected by the bidder as in the "mortgage rates" example.
2) Bidding against their own clients.
>a software application that users download.
What is the URL to download?
"Find what has "pathetic" fraud protection, and the majority of the fraud seems to be coming from a major partner, advertising.com...."
"I caught their bot, by taking a fresh referrer, and plugging it into a browser, then hitting the stop button before it could "re-direct".... I knew they were running a "scam" bot, because the IP was 127.0.0.1, which is a default "local host" IP for a local web server...."
The only info I have is that these are apparently untrue comments because UtilMind httpget is mearly a software component used to embed web pages in software applications, and the IP addresses listed are mearly the local IP the user is going through when being delivered to the advertisers web site. UtilMind httpget used to be available from utilmind.com but it appears this site is no longer around - I recognize it as a shareware or inexpensive tool to enable peope to imbed web pages, ads, etc. into software applications. Not sure where it is available for download these days...
Hope this makes sense....
How can you say these are "untrue" comments... Most automated application is going to use some type of ActiveX control to automate the http request through an application..
Whether it be UtilMind, or Dev-Soft's control, in no way has anything to do with the fraud.. We use Dev-Soft's controls for our ranking system, but we change the user agent property to resemble a standard user browser.. I could load up a proxy server with 1000 IP's, and from a desktop run a keyword list of the top 1000 keyword bids, and slam any of the PPC advertisers, from random, pooled, IP's, through the PPC engine. It's not hard to pull a page through an http request, parse the links on the page, then simulate a user clicking through....
FindWhat already admitted they had a fraud problem, and has credited our account. BUT, this problem is still going on, and I suggest that anybody with a FindWhat account, check their management reports in FindWhat's system, starting in November, and look for charged clicks, where the search phrase was in Proper Case -> Diamond Engagement Rings ...
If you notice more than 1 to 2% of your billed clicks coming in Proper Case, and they aren't Proper Names, such as cities, product names, you are probably getting bogus clicks....
Advertising.com has been caught by a couple of people here, I was able to capture the static page, they were simulating the clicks through.. It's tough enough to compete in the PPC world, we don't need PPC engine partners/affiliates racking up "bogus" click charges on our accounts!
I would be more careful in making accusations personally - and while you could be right, nothing you described would lead me to the conclusion you made, and from what I see advertising.com is large company backed by AOL...not your typical "cheater. Again, I don't typically look at this forum but I am surprised to see accusations of this nature with so little ammo.
I've been doing this for a few years, and most will tell you I'm not one to start pointing fingers, without doing my homework... :)
I mentioned above, we were able to capture the "static" page that advertising.com was feeding their automated program... That in addition to the fact, that FindWhat stated other advertisers had recently complained about similar traffic patterns, all around the time that "advertising.com" became a FindWhat affiliate/partner.
Compounded by the fact that FindWhat issued a credit to our account, stating they had found "bogus" click throughs, tells me that I'm just basically stating what has actually occured, and is not speculative theory?
I've also stated, that Findwhat has bent over backwards to rectify the situation. My stand remains the same on advertising.com.. And I've expressed my concern to FindWhat, that for good PR with their advertisers (The ones that keep their lights on?), that they should seriously consider their position with advertising.com...
Our client portfolio includes many Fortune 500's, And my concern is always for my clients, first, and foremost... :)
Not your typical cheater, have you heard about the lawsuit against them for version 5.0? (I know it's off topic, I'll leave it at that.)
The company I'm with also works with them, and they are, for the most part, great.
But the reference to "potentially slanderous comments", well, that's a matter of opinion. We're getting our refund for the bogus clicks already, so if they are so quick to apologize, how could we be mistaken?
Feel free to feel good about FWHT though, from personal experience or those of others. Just look at their financials, and I know you'll be smiling...;)
Cheers,
Han Solo
By the way, Redzone, how did you figure out all this? My logs don't really tell me anything. Just a bunch of:
IP: 153.19.0.60
referrer: [127.0.0.1:880...]
Of course, when you go to [127.0.0.1:880...] it's a "page cannot be found" error.
Redzone, feel free to email me:
mkunugi@email.com
The page was basically sparse, with nothing but a text link, and a Findwhat URL in the hyperlink that would simulate a click through on FindWhat's server, charging our account.
Update: I left our account balance at zero for about 10 days, and then added funds just last week. Guess What? The bogus clicks kicked in less than 30 minutes after I replenished the account. We aren't going to utilize FindWhat until they break the relationship with advertising.com.. After the Christmas holidays I'm going to get back with FW customer service, and try and sort this out. I really think they have a great customer service group, and a solid system. Such a shame that this partnership would jeopardize our use of their service..
