The 11/25-12/1 edition of The Economist has a brief piece of click fraud. Some of their points:
- Internet advertising is a $27 billion business today and it should be $61 billion by 2010. In 2001, it was just $9 billion.
- Click fraud comes up from two areas. First, advertising affiliates (read: the Google content network) create bogus clicks. Second, competitors click on your ads to exhaust your budget.
- What percentages of clicks are fraudulent? 10-50%, with an emphasis on the 10% range.
- Google and Yahoo are now taking the problem more seriously and both expect to have an independent auditing system by the middle of next year.
- One alternative to pay per click is pay per action. The advertiser only pays on conversion. This idea doesn’t have a lot of traction yet and, in fact, may be a non starter since it would link search engine compensation to factors outside of their control.
Great. So what can you do in the mean time?
My own strategy is simple. I never advertise on the content network (it never resulted in new customers for me, anyway) and, while my advertising is on I have a high enough daily budget that I’m sure I’m not going to run out. Oh, and I also track the IP addresses of visitors and complain loudly if I think someone is scamming me. Finally, I do some common sense things like add negative keywords for searches that Google sent my way even though they aren’t particularly useful.
Interestingly, having just done a search on Google, I can’t find anything which specifically says “Report Click Fraud” so I sent them a note asking how to do it. I’ll post their reply.
And, note to anyone from the Economist reading this: your leader on page 13 and your article on page 65 are so similar they’re practically redundant. I expect better from you.