Fear of Click Fraud is Back
Steve Rubel points to a new BusinessWeek investigation into Click Fraud. You can read the full article here. I wrote about this back in July in my post Click Fraud Could Spoil the Internet Advertising Party. I think many of the concerns I highlighted back then, still ring true.
I’m an advertiser. I think I’m like most in our industry. I have a limited budget and I want to make sure that what few dollars I have are well spent.
I’ve done a lot of research into online advertising recently and have recommended we re-allocate a large chunk of our print dollars into online spending over the coming year. But I’m nervous and I want to make sure I’m getting the best value for our ad buys.
I’m definitely concerned about the possibility of my ad dollars being wasted on competitors, clickbots or “paid to read” farms clicking my ads and draining my monthly budget. When you read that about 10-15% of ad clicks are fake, this is more than enough reason to get antsy.
I like to think Yahoo and Google take this problem seriously. But as BusinessWeek points out, the search engines have an incentive to tolerate it. So the problem likely won’t go away soon.
Am I being overly cautious? Is the media blowing this out of proportion? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? These are some of the questions I’m asking myself right now.
In any case, it looks like the click fraud storm, which looked like it had died down for a while, may be brewing again.
Galen | Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
I think the “incentive to tolerate it” argument is patently false. For every false visitor they send to you, Yahoo and Google lose reputation AND cause you to bid less because your click conversion rate is lower than it might otherwise be. Furthermore, the amount that they might get from click-fraud pales in comparison to the amount they lose from people who opt out for fear of click fraud.
There is some click fraud, but given reasonable monitoring on your end, you can keep it at the same level as your competitors, which means you’re advertising on a level playing field.
Joel Burslem | Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
I’m not going to let the fear of click fraud stop me from advertising on the Internet, that’s for sure.
I guess where I see the breakdown is on the PR side, Google and Yahoo aren’t doing much of anything to reassure advertisers that they’re not wasting their dollars.
Their silence on the issue begs a lot of these questions…
Are they complicit?
Do they care?
Can they even stop it?
Richard Johnston | Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
The best advice i can give my Realtor friends is to drive traffic to your site from print advertising. I’d say click fraud is more than 10-15 percent. Having spend thousands of dollars advertising on Google and Yahoo in recent months, I’d say click fraud is in the 35-40% range.
Galen | Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
Richard, having worked with a company that does loads of business from pay-per-click, I’d say that there is click fraud, but advertisers lose far more money on buying the wrong words or presenting the wrong landing page than they do on fraudulent searchers. That said, my client tends to keep advertising on Google and Yahoo and skip their ad networks.
Joel, the PR side is lacking, but, at least from Google, it’s kind of lacking all around. Have you ever seen them do much PR on anything? If you read their blogs or interviews with them, you’d find that they’re pretty obsessed with keeping click fraud to a minimum (a couple of badly phrased gaffes aside). See http://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=mattcutts.com&as_q=fraud
If they aren’t concerned, they’re crazy: the less click fraud there is, the more ads they’ll sell and the more advertisers will spend per click.