Click Discrepancy with Overture PPC

Click Discrepancy

[kat_hawk]

Since Monday I have seen a huge discrepancy with Overture. Overture is reporting 4xs the number of clicks we are. Has anyone seen the same thing? I know Yahoo! is doing a big crawl, but would they crawl their own directory?

[Voxman]

PPC click Fraud is getting worse every month. Mostly due to the so called partners. At first Overture and Google only let sites with good repuations into the game...but now they let in hundreds of fly by nighters with URL rich keywords as their only content all in a bit for rankings.

I've been following a couple. They virtually have no traffic yet they continually show up in our logs as one of the top producers of clicks. There are link farms and more than one software out there that can click links while changing IP addresses (proxies) to outwit fraud detection. They made a big mistake with these partners as I'm sure many are cheating Overture and businesses out of our advertisng money. Overture's reaction is too simply say it's not true and asked us to investigate our Logs. We simply told them that it was their job not ours.

ROI is the name of the game and it has steadily gone down. That is the only proof we need. In fact we've gone further with this and reduced many of our keyword positions to much lower levels (trying to avoid the click fraud artists and farm) with the result of much better ROI.

Our company in particular will be going over the logs extensively looking for Proxie addresses and signs of fraud. If we find any proof of this and other businesses follow through with their own investigations...Overture better watch out because they are primarily responsible if fraud is happening and could find themselves in a major class action civil suit or even criminal proceedings.

PPC was working till they added all those partners and left the door open for cheating. Now the engines are spammed with 100's of these so called search page garbage sites that take space away from real contect. Yahoo and Google are becomming a search directory when you can find other search engines....

sigh.... sorry for the long rant...but watching my add dollars go up & up (espcially in the last month) yet ROI not growing at the same rate and Overture refusing to acknowledge or even admit that their is a problem is frustrating indeed. At least google took one of their affiliate partners to court for click fraud..so they admitted that there is a problem in PPC land.

Eventually greed will kill the PPC business because they have left the framework for fraud to survive and prosper...and then we will all be on to the next new best thing

[luckychucky]

I just got a HUGE, HUGE, shockingly HUGE click increase. Went from a longstanding circa $15 per day to a sudden $189 in one day, I kid you not.

But you know what's horrible about it? I've been over and over Overture's advertiser center with a fine tooth comb. I can find no way to contact them, period. No eMail, no phone, not even a postal address. Am I blind or what? They can't charge for their services and offer no contact method whatsoever. This is insane.

[daveg]

luckychucky,

Log into the data center and scroll to the bottom of the page. There you will find a link named "Support Center" in light grey (they hide it pretty well).

[luckychucky]

Thanks so very very

[tigger]

thanks daveg you beast me to it, I had problems recently with a "partner" site so spoke to O about this they refunded the clicks and gave the "partner" site a slap on the wrist

[whoknows]

It seems to me that Overture is responsible for monitoring their fraudulent partners as they are providing a service and charging advertisers for fraudulent clicks. It is unreasonable for Overture to expect business owners (thier advertisers) to monitor Overtures (or their partners) fraudulent charges. It is just a matter of time before a class action suit is brought up against them as well as Google for unfair business practices as well as a number of other causes of action. Just imagine if we were to charge our clients for services not rendered and blamed it on one of our partners.

[Voxman]

Just tell me where to sign up for the class actions suit. Overture and Google are playing a dangerous game. When they first started ...all the partner sites like about.com were credible. Now they have spammy url rich sites with no traffic yet producing a lot of clicks. Y & G are ultimately responsble if their shady new partners (they take anyone now) are defrauding them and businesses out of our advertising dollar. I know if we ever get proof and we are working on that right now, we won't hesitate to bring a lawsuit against them. Mostly because they pretend it's not happening and they have it under control. Either they are lying or in denial.

I'll have more after or proxy search on our logs in completed, but it looks like we have two of their partners playing a 'shady' game which is probably the tip of the iceberg. Maybe shelling out a few hundred million in suit damages will wake them up.

[kat_hawk]

i completely goofed on my message. i meant to say that we are reporting 4X what Overture is, so in this case no funny business by anyone on the CPC side.

overture reports 4000
we report 12000

has anyone seen this?

[Jmez]

Good Article on Click Fraud

[developers.evrsoft.com...]

[shorebreak]

Anyone care to comment on what types of click fraud - and what % of total click fraud - Overture & Google's detection systems are incapable of detecting?

It really surprises me that so little is known about the nature of their click fraud detection systems. I for one, would like to know what, if any, inherent limitations there are in systems that can't view the client's own server logs.

Are they catching 5%, 25%, 50% or 75% of click fraud out there?