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My August examples demonstrate what I call "syndication fraud" -- Yahoo placing advertisers' ads into spyware programs, and charging advertisers for resulting clicks. But Yahoo's spyware problems extend beyond improper syndication. In my August syndication fraud examples, an advertiser only pays Yahoo if a user clicks the advertiser's ad. Not so for three of today's examples. Here, spyware completely fakes a click -- causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a "pay-per-click" fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is "click fraud."
Damning, to say the least.
[edited by: Woz at 12:27 pm (utc) on April 7, 2006]
[edit reason] Made link live [/edit]
This is nothing new and has been going on for years, as i've posted in other threads.
Sure, but this is the most in-depth proof of spyware-generated click fraud that I've seen, rather than the usual "I got #*$! clicks but no conversions from these IPs" type of complaint you usually see here.
Anyone else experiencing this as well?
J
Thank you for the great article about Yahoo!. Please let us know when your Google article comes out.
I have cut our spending on Yahoo by 50%. The conversion rate with them is lousy.
We have stopped advertising with them entirely. I now save about $400 a day and am noticing very little difference in sales.
Go figure? Sayônara Yahoo.
I think if they ever do that,they will rise the bids
Yes i know that OVT bids are the highest PPC bids atm but thats what i think
I think if they ever do that,they will rise the bidsYes i know that OVT bids are the highest PPC bids atm but thats what i think
I'd rather pay more per click for traffic I have control over. Click fraud is bad enough; ads going to adware, spyware, etc. is out of control.
I sent an email to Yahoo, but have yet to hear a reply as to what they intend to do.
Any thoughts here?
Martin
Martin
YSM refunded us a couple of thousand clicks for a period between 26 Apr - 4 May. I wonder how big is the click fraud in reality...
It's impossible to tell for sure, because fraudulent traffic can be manufactured to look "legit".
Click fraud should be pretty big but i am wondering why Y cant implement the same screening technology which G did
We can't tell how good G's screening technology is compared to Y!'s because it's not being run against Y!'s traffic. For all we know, G's screening technology isn't any better; it may be that G just has better converting users.
A possible goal of click auditing would be for each of the engines/networks to submit their fraud detection code to various types of traffic including that considered to be fraudulent, and have each rated according to its ability to detect fraud. But even this is not the strongest confidence measure; it doesn't take into account fraudulent patterns that the people preparing the test didn't think of. (However, it may satisfy the courts.)
If top players cant screen 100% of fraudulent clicks then maybe they are doing their best but cant detect all fraudulent clicks in today reality?
I didn't quite understand you here, but in general, it isn't possible to detect a considerable number of types of click fraud due to the way the Internet is designed and architected. Furthermore, what could be considered fraudulent could also be considered nonconverting. Keep in mind that there are people with big budgets who don't care about a sizable amount of nonconverting traffic; all they care about is ROI. People on limited budgets are much more sensitive to nonconverting clicks, especially if they're paying top CPC.
