ClickFrauds, Transparency & Google

A new study finds that about 15 percent of pay-per-click advertising dollars could be lost due to clickfrauds, contends a new study. Pathological traffic that impacted a small sample of less than a dozen websites resulted in advertisers being billed for illicit clicks that the search engines did not catch. The early results of a Fair Isaac study of click fraud showed some channels could hit ad campaign budgets at a rate of 10 to 15 percent.
Also, Fair Isaac contends that Google's specific estimates of what their unsupervised detection efforts find in click fraud is "not believable," based on their experience detecting fraud in other industries. Without advertiser data, search engines cannot defeat click fraud.

The 10 to 15 percent rate of pathological traffic hitting Fair Isaac's small sample of advertisers, less than a dozen sites, far exceeds the 0.02 percent rate touted by Google. Earlier, Danny Sullivan wrote Google’s declaration that self clicks are traced and offset looks like a wrong claim as its feasibility looks suspect. Some of those who have been blacklisted by Google for adsense misuse cry about Google’s highhandedness in dealing with them by stopping their accounts without sharing much details of the suspected fraud. With Google poised to massively increase its revenue owing to conquering more marketshare, it is only fair that there is some more openness from Google into their fraud detection methods, which they guard closely for the protection of their advertisers, or more results from the Fair Isaac test, it's hard to tell who to believe right now.

Labels: Clickfrauds, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends, Google