Craig Danuloff of Revenews brings up a good point about Click Fraud; it’s coming from the fake affiliate spam sites mostly - not from people deliberately clicking on ads two or three times.
"Google and Yahoo need to stop pretending the problem is in click-stream analysis, and move to distribution-partner analysis. Further, advertisers need to make it 100% clear that paying to run ads on un-named websites over which they have no say or control is unacceptable."
I tried looking for Click Fraud several times using KeywordMax’s Click Auditor program on sites of my clients who suspected such behavior and had KeywordMax running. I found very little of what could be termed Click Fraud. I looked for duplicate IP addresses clicking on similar of the same ads within a minute or two apart. I found, most often, when the same ip address clicked on another ad from the same site, it was really for some other part of the inventory (ie: office furniture - desks, vs. office furniture - school desk furniture); you can’t really call that Click Fraud.
"Click fraud doesn’t come (in any significant quantity) from serious sites. It comes from junk sites on which no advertiser would ever intentionally decide to place their ads. Surely there are some PHDs running around the GooglePlex that can look at a wasteland landing page full of nothing but sludge and PPC ads and decide that ‘the best user experience’ is not served by syndicating ads onto that site. "
I think what’s happening is the Search Engines, eager to have ads appear in as many places as they can (so there will be more clicks and therefore, more money made) have lowered the bar to allow many spam sites to become part of the content distribution network. I think Search Engines, Google and Yahoo mainly, in this respect, don’t want to lost part of their distribution network, even if that network is spam. Who knows, if they investigated too deeply , they might end up having to cut out half of their distribution partners - they don’t want to do that…can you blame them?
The Click Fraud problem is very complicated - it’s not that easy to solve without search engines also losing money because they are cutting down the number of places ads will appear- and no one wants that to happen - God Forbid!!!! The problem is..by allowing advertising to appear in "junk sites" the search engines are legitimizing those sites - it sends a message that it’s OK for Google and Yahoo to feed ads to Spam Sites; I think that’s a bad message but I’m not sure what the solution is.
