Ways To Identify And Tackle Click Fraud
August 20th, 2010Identifying and tracking examples of click deception is the first step to eradicating the problem. Click deception is an enormous drain on the resources of advertisers operating on a national and international scale, estimated to occupy around 30% of all pay per click advertising spend. With so much at stake, its no wonder the search engines are investing so much time and effort into devising solutions.
One way in which Search Engines and different pay per click programme providers have attempted to curb the rising click fraud issue is through introducing IP address repetition algorithms. These formulae are made to pick up on shady click patterns emanating from a singular IP address, that can help to bring out the existence of click farms and competitor-led sabotage, in addition to identifying potential fraudsters at source.
All the same, there is an range of troubles with this technique of attempting to identify the con men. First, fraudsters logging on through a dialup modem, DSL line or cable modem can nearly completely bypass this check, as with every new online session, a new IP address is generated. Moreover, there is a broad range of software accessible to alter IP addresses, which again can be used for ‘cheating’ the system. Cookie and session tracking are other methods by which search engines can attempt to uncover potential fraudulent activity, but again there are ways around these for the fraudsters.
More detailed software is being developed which profiles and reports on the browsing habits of each click-through to enable businesses to track and monitor suspicious behavior, although this could be observed by many as intrusive and ineffective as anything on a small scale is still likely to go unnoticed, based on the vast coverage of ads across the web.
The issue of click fraud recently hit the headlines with a class action raised against Google, prompting Google to offer $90million as a potential settlement. Perhaps an acceptance of their responsibilities, Google’s offer goes a long way to suggest the level of click fraud, and its vast costs to the world wide web economy.
There are a number of self-help treatments that can be carried out to keep an establishment out of trouble. The first of these remedies is the reliance on seo and organic listings. If a site is well and fully optimized, it could eventually realize a ranking that another site is prepared to pay $2.50 a click for. Similarly, with organically high rankings there are no clickthrough rates, as a consequence the charges associated with PPC are not applicable. Although the process is substantially more laborious and takes significantly longer to see results, the search engine optimization process is much cheaper in the long term, and with an estimated 25-30% of all clicks being performed fraudulently, an organically high listing can save money which would somewhat be drained by click fraud for more beneficial reinvestment.
Year on year, as the pay per click advertising market continues to grow and expand, surely click fraud will follow suit. Unless an impressive means of preventing click fraud is developed and successfully implemented, buyers will steadily become shy in the advertising medium and become more efficient, less wasteful ways to market, which would seriously hit the search engines and could potentially threaten the Internet economy generally.
Keith has been writing articles online for nearly 4 years now. Not only does this author specialize in alternative energey you can also check out his article directory on adsense earn money. Information is not hard to find for adsense revenue if you look hard enough. Keith’s site has lots of information on Google Adsense
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