Web Traffic Fraud.com

You would be fooling yourselves, if you believe that your ad is immune to web traffic click fraud. If you have been lucky enough not to have been a victim yet, you can be almost be sure that sooner or later you will get hit by fraudulent clicks that range from invalid to incentivized clicks. Though you cannot completely overcome click frauds, you can reduce the impact of web traffic fraud within your online advertising campaigns. In this article we will look at some of the things that can be done to decrease your exposure to click fraud.

Disable Content Syndication: One of the easiest and most effective manner in which you can minimize the vulnerability to web traffic fraud is to disable your ads within the content syndication network. All search engine advertisers such as Google and Yahoo have this feature and you should disable it.

On the other hand we believe that the content networks can generate good traffic volume that does convert well but if you are a novice to these types of networks it’s like playing Russian roulette with your ad budget. On the other hand, some websites receive a lot of prospective customers from ads in the content network and by disabling this; you are potentially filtering out these legit customers as well. So you can be aggressive in stopping “click-farming” but at the same time are you “throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

PPC Audits: Today there are several third parties who offer click fraud detection and click fraud auditing services. The advantage of engaging their services is that they would be able to log statistical evidence needed to prove click fraud from your web server logs by micro analysis. Once you get their reports, you can then submit it to the search companies and request for a refund for clicks that were not genuine. Keep in mind that this is a tedious process and most search engines are reluctant to give cash refunds. Instead they would at best grant you additional ad exposure as a refund. Also remember that in this case the search engine appears to be the final decision maker (judge and jury) and they can simply refuse to accept your claims by sticking to their guns and claiming that they were genuine clicks. Your only recourse at this point is a lawsuit and what small online business has the budget for a tedious expensive lawsuit?

Site Blocking: This is the last option that you as a business owner may have. This enables you to blacklist certain sites so that your ad does not appear to them. This is a very useful way to not just reduce web traffic frauds, but also to minimize the low value clicks.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

There are several companies who are working on developing products that can easily identify web traffic fraud or Click Fraud. Some of these solutions essentially need the co-operation of the advertising networks, and so these firms are trying to develop a good rapport with these networks but are met with resistance for obvious reasons. Broadly solutions are available that tackle web traffic fraud. They can be classified into two groups:

1. Forensic Analysis: These rely on an analysis of the log files in the web server of the advertiser. This will give a detailed idea about factors such as where the traffic originated from and what was the subsequent behavior of the traffic after reaching the landing pages. Since these tools use the normal industry wide log files, advertising network companies such as Google can independently verify the data that comes up from this analysis. The flip side of this method is that the people who actually do the forensic analysis should be reliable and have a high degree of professional ethics and honesty.

But realize that short of a court order you will never see a Google traffic log file. So the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the advertisers with no real leverage to enforce the findings of fraud.

2. Third party Tools: There are web-based solutions that can be used to tag the ads. This involves the use of a JavaScript or a tiny single pixel image on the landing page of the advertiser. Cookies can be used to collect information about the visitor into a third party storage location and while doing an analysis of web traffic fraud this can be downloaded and analyzed. These products range from simple raw data of traffic to be further analyzed to higher end scrapers and filters, which highlight clicks that seem to not originate from a genuine buyer. It is very easy to add false information to the log files (user agents, IP addresses etc.) of the advertiser’s web server and therefore a third party storage of data (third party fraud auditing service) is more reliable and acceptable to an advertising network. However caveat is that if the fraud originates from or is directed against a publisher then these solutions may not be easily able to trace the pattern as they are focused on a single advertiser alone and see only a small part of the entire traffic volume.

Thus these solutions reach conclusions based on a snapshot of data thereby increasing the possibility of a wrong diagnosis and false positives.

Bookmark this site. You probably have many questions and concerns. We cannot possibly answer all of them in one article. Or please leave a comment or question. We will be happy to respond.

© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com