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Google and Click Fraud
Nice little point counter point on click fraud from Forbes, they ask Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google a bunch of questions on click fraud and had Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics rebut them. Such as this little exchange about counting “back clicks”. He talks about “many browsers” reload the webpage when you hit the back button, but, just focusing on IE, that shouldn’t be the case, in my copy of IE7 the browsing history is set to Automatically, which means,
“This setting specifies that when you return to a page you viewed previously, Internet Explorer should not check to see whether the page has changed since you last viewed it.
If you select this setting, Internet Explorer checks for new content only when you return to a page that you viewed in an earlier session of Internet Explorer or on an earlier day. Over time, if Internet Explorer determines that images on the page are changing infrequently, it checks for newer images even less frequently.” So, I wouldn’t think that would be a huge part of the clicks.
Forbes: Click Forensics reports that click fraud is increasing–you disagree. Why?
Ghosemajumder: The big problem with third-party auditors is that they continue to count “fictitious clicks,” clicks that Google doesn’t count as clicks at all, in click fraud estimates. Here’s one major example: Users click on a Google ad on Google.com or an Adsense site. When they land on the advertiser’s site, they click on products, hitting the “back” button to go back to the landing page. Many browsers reload the landing page each time. We don’t count those as clicks, but third-party auditors actually register each click on the “back” button as another click on an ad, which grossly overestimates the number of ad clicks.
How do you handle “click-backs,” situations in which a user reloads an advertisement’s landing page? Do you and other auditors count the page’s reloading as another click on the ad?
Cuthbert: Absolutely not. Using Google Click ID prevents us from counting click-backs, and even when we have analyzed the number of click-backs compared to the overall problem of click fraud, it’s a very small percentage. Regardless, using Click IDs and other methodologies means there are no fictitious clicks in our data.
If I sound somewhat aggravated, it’s because I am. Shuman knows very well that we use Google Click ID. But he has a tendency to talk about fictitious clicks and then bring up our name to try to link us with that, even though he knows it’s not true. We’re a bit frustrated with that. Source:Stealing Clicks
My favorite quote from Shuman is this one though,
Have you seen an increase in click fraud in recent months?
It’s difficult to say. We filter out fewer than 10% of clicks as invalid, but you can’t draw a very precise line between malicious activity and invalid clicks that might have been made with malicious intent. Anyone spending time looking at the percentage changes in something where you can’t draw a precise line doesn’t understand the issue.
One metric we do have is the number of cases in which we refund advertisers for click fraud, and that has remained stable at less than .02%, quarter after quarter.
The number of cases they refund advertisers for click fraud is .02% and has been that way for awhile, so that means click fraud is not increasing.
Hello, is this thing on?
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