marketingpilgrim.com — Shuman Ghosemajumder of Google discusses how the click fraud rate on Google is less then 2% and shows proof to backup his numbers. He also breaks down Google's click fraud filtering system and how Google is becoming more transparent.
Dec 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
moguaDec 11, 2006
How about we all use the power of digg to do an experiment of our own?Let's all disable our ad-blocks and start clicking the Google ads on this page.Kevin, Alex: If you read this and see anything other than a "2%" increase in clicks, please let us know one way or another.
scottwoodardDec 11, 2006
I know everyone's first instinct is to question the numbers since no data was actually revealed, but if nothing else this is at least a step in the right direction for Google. A little transparency could certainly help their pr.
ripbergeDec 11, 2006
I'm not buying 2%. I recently opened up an account with google and within a day I had $20 worth of ad clicks from their "content network" partners (adsense). While the search engine ad clicks I had from google totaled $0.Now you can interpret this massive discrepancy as 1 of 2 things. A) Contextual ads are drastically more effective than paid search or B) its a result of website operators somehow manipulating clicks to earn themselves money.I chose B and disabled the content network ads. Now I only run search engine ads and I've been happy with the results. Google--your content network blows.
zoom1928Dec 11, 2006
> Google--your content network blowsI agree. For our site for elementary school kids, Google has decided to show ads for match.com and for real estate. Of course not many of the kids click on those ads. Example from a couple of weeks ago:<a class="user" href="http://users.upstate.net/zoom/adsense_fraud2.gif">http://users.upstate.net/zoom/adsense_fraud2.gif</a>We made less than $3 for over 412,000 impressions. Google really needs to start picking the ads they show so that they're appropriate for the audience. Why haven't they built such a system?
zopuDec 11, 2006
If you read the update, you'll see that this is actually 2% of 'invalid' clicks. i.e. the actual percentage of all clicks which are fraudulent is much much smaller.
halfbrownDec 12, 2006
There's no way to make such a blanket statement about a percentage of fraud when clearly not every site is the same. The core of a websites content type (shopping, information, downloads, etc.) will draw different parts of the market, and the more active and/or profitable ones will more than likely attract the fraudsters like a fly to honey since there is a greater possibility of conversion (i.e. - money!). Every site will be different; some may have less than 1% fraud, but there are certainly others with a greater percentage.And PowerPoint, SchmowerPoint... don't draw us a (pretty) picture when what would really be useful to prove the point would be actual numbers, stats, perhaps a case study from a real life victim of click fraud. I understand the desire to keep competitors noses out of where they don't belong, but don't ask us to take on faith that which many of us know to be false to begin with.I don't know... maybe it's the late hour of this post talking, but the whole article reads like the work of a corporate schill for Google. And don't get me wrong, I love Google, but c'mon.
bigellowDec 12, 2006
Those who doubt the figures, I think, have lost a bit of a grip on reality. Google's properties alone get an average of 20 billion page views per day. The number of ads served as a result of this kind of traffic is astronomical. Add the fact that the Adsense network is vast, and likely adds quite a bit of traffic to this figure, and you've got a lot of accumulated traffic. Click fraud and bots and proxies exist, yes. Many are also undetected, yes. However, in order for these fraudsters to make a dent larger than, say, 5%, they would have to generate a billion page views per day. This would be necessary in order to simulate a typical human user who isn't going to click on every ad they see.This is why it is so important than Google gets the lion's share of Internet traffic. It's so that they can see the trends of normal human activity, and can compare this to unusual human (bot) activity. If the bots (or human farms) carefully mimic the legitimate ad clickers, they would have to compete with billions of legitimate daily page views in order to generate high percentages.Think of it this way. Shop-lifting exists. There is no way to stop it. It happens. Companies spend millions of dollars to prevent shop-lifting, but all it really stops are casual or opportunistic shop-lifters. The professional shop-lifters are still out there and still get away with it. HOWEVER, the number of successful professional shop-lifters compared to the number of legitimate shoppers in the world is a small percentage. So, retailers add this into their pricing and live with it. If 10% or 20% of retail inventory started going missing as a result of this, they would definitely ramp up security efforts. As long as it stays in the realm of small percentages, they are better off taking the hit than spending more than they would lose to try to combat it.The same goes for click fraud. It exists. It will always exist. But, as long as the amount of fraudster activity is such a small minority compared to the amount of legitimate web traffic, eTailers are better off factoring this into their pricing and dealing with it rather than constantly coming up with new conspiracy theories about how click-fraudsters are somehow consisting of 1/5th of the world's Internet traffic. While we're at it, the ISPs of the world should start dealing with the issue of 20% of the web traffic through the pipelines coming from criminal activity. Let's stop 'em at the ISPs. ;)
bigellowJan 4, 2007
Aside from the fact that the numbers you used were incorrect, you are also using an argument that suggests that anything and everything is debatable to be intolerable. For instance, no matter how much large stores do to thwart shop-lifting, no matter what, there is going to be a certain percentage of inventory that will go mysteriously missing. As a result of this, prices reflect this lost inventory. Shouldn't we be picketing every store until they prevent shop-lifting 100% so that we don't have to pay inflated prices? Hardly. You could use your "baby dropping analogy" in this instance, as well, but it just turns a logical debate into an emotional debate, which doesn't solve anything.The truth of the matter is, at some point, in order to eliminate shop-lifting 100%, stores would have to spend more on security than they might have lost in inventory. So, we're stuck with even HIGHER prices. Then, we could use the baby analogy once more to get everyone to pick up their pitchforks and torches.What is being said, regarding click-fraud, is that fraudulent activity likely accounts for less than 2% of total advertisement activity. And that efforts are being made on a constant basis to combat this. However, nobody is going to make a perfectly stable operating system that can't have issues now and then... nobody is going to make a perfect website that cannot be hacked now and then... and nobody can make a ship that might not sink. With this fact in mind, the real goal is to reduce the negative possibilities to as small of a margin as possible. I think Google has done an excellent job in this regard. Others who wish to claim that click-fraud is rampant are those who are likely just the random lynch mob types that love to control the masses through panic, or those who have a service or product to sell you.
mikeabundoJan 9, 2007
98% of all direct marketing spend is wasted. 2% is fantastic by comparison.