Google's Click Fraud Analysis

Hey guys, just found out that Google has actually been checked up. It's in the Tuzhilin Report. Sorry about not updating. I'm going to try to do it every monday wednesday friday now.




A brief summary (the report is 47 pages) - not including the history of PPC and stuff.
(most of this is quoted/ paraphrased, but I got all this stuff from the Tuzhilin Report)

Some Definitions of Click Fraud:
Wikipedia: "Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitamate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click."
Google's def. of invalid: "Clicks ... generated through prohibited means. and intended to artificially increase click ... counts on a publisher [or advertiser -AST] account"

Invalid Clicks can come from the following sources:
1. individuals deploying automated clicking programs or software applications (called bots) specifically desgined to click on ads
2. ad individual employing low-cost workers or incentivizing others to click on the advertising links
3. publishers manually clicking on the ads on their pages
4. publishers manipulating web pages in such a way that user interactions with the web site result in inadvertent clicks
5. publishers subscribing to paid traffic websites that artificially bring extra trafiic to the site, including extra clicking on the ads
6. advertisers manually clicking on the ads of thier competitiors
7. publishers being sabotaged by their competitors or other ill-wishers
8. various trype of unintentional clicks, such a doubleclicks or customers getting ocnfused and unintentionally clicking on the ad without a malicious intent.
9. technical problems, system implementation errors and coordination activities between Google.com and its affiliates resulting in double-counting errors
10. multiple accounts of AdSense publishers: some AdSense publishers illegally open "new" account under different names and using false identities; all the clicks originiated from these illegal accoutns are considered invalid.

Important note: it's impossible to deter with 100% certainty that a click is fraudulent.
There's a big problem with the click fraud detection and the advertisers because without giving out the tests, advertisers won't trust the click fraud detection, and by giving out the tests, the tests and inherently useless because people will learn to bypass them.

Google relies on prevention and detection, ie making it hard to create duplicate accounts,hard to register using fake ids, development of mechanisms that automatically discount fraudulent activities.

The detection tests are simple, so Google relies on:
1. Combination of tests
2. Complexity of few tests.
3. Simplicity of attacks.
4. Long tail of invalid clicks.

Problems with Google tests:
1. lack of deployment of data-mining methods.
2. Using conversion data in filters - hard to use because most don't purchase
3. More advanced filters.

Final note:
The amount of refunds given advertisers is minuscule when compared to the invalid clicks thrown out voluntarily by google.