Considering a Third Party Click Fraud Solution?
If you are an online advertiser trying to engage the services of a third party web traffic fraud detection and auditing firm, then you need to be aware of certain things to look for in a comprehensive click fraud detection solution. Click Fraud is very difficult to detect especially without years of in-depth knowledge on the many ways click fraudster use to deceive even the most trained and sophisticated eye.
There are literally 1000’s, if not hundreds of 1000’s of click fraudsters making a decent living committing fraud daily. Lets face it, unlike email spamming who is policing click fraud? Who is getting caught and serving jail time for these activities? It’s still basically the wild wild west out there in cyberspace when it comes to click fraud. Its time to take matters into your own hands armed with the best solutions available.
Some third party click fraud monitoring and auditing service not only just provide click audit data, but also meaningful compressive reports that you can confirm with your own logs to support suspected invalid/fraudulent clicks. A good solution should be very user friendly and should offer features such as the ability to blacklist offending sites. If the solution allows you to build a blacklist then it can be easily exported to the PPC sites such as Google to immediately reduce the impact of click fraud.
There are many solutions from complicated back-end filters to on landing page tracking scripts. There is a thin line of difference between a low value click and click fraud and automated solutions may not always be able to identify the difference. Many automated solutions can produce false-positives where one could end up “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” per say. One way in which a third party click fraud auditing service can overcome this problem is by rating the level of click fraud based on past IP patterns and IP origination and user behavior -which some refer to as post analysis. In the same way you can implement you own post analytical regime from past log reports to build your own blacklists, whitelists etc,.
Another important factor to keep in mind, while selecting click fraud detection software is to check whether they offer a free trial. A free trial would let you experiment with the software and then make you can make a decision on whether it is the right service for you.
During your free trial, check out all its features and think of whether you need all of them (if not, you can think of a less sophisticated solution) or whether certain essential features are missing (in this case, you need to look for a different software with better features). Keep in mind though most click auditing solutions are simple trackers for ads and not standalone click fraud detectors. More times than not, click fraud detection is an add-on module, an after thought and may not serve your needs as a suitable click fraud solution.
Some solution providers maintain a master database of websites, which are notorious for click frauds. These solutions have their own crawlers similar to that of search engine crawlers and they try to keep this database up to date by verifying websites based on currently known web traffic fraud patterns.
