PPC Fraud

[cheng]

Guys, how to prevent Pay per click fraud? For those who dont know what it means. Its actually clicks being clicked by your competitors when you are using PPC advertising solution like adwords or yahoo. That will generate unneccessery expenses and the problem is even more fraustrating when your PPC cost is very high.

I heard of companies that lost $300,000 because of this and they cant report google or yahoo because they are afraid of being blacklisted (which i dont know why google or yahoo would want to do that)

[bps092]

As far as I know this is becoming a huge problem for google now. They have addressed it and accounts are being banned and locked up (adsense accounts) if they are found cheating. Google has a pretty solid equation for determining such cheating... and they are starting to cover their tracks. Not sure about yahoo/overture though.

[mxer210]

I think PPC has some REAL problems ahead of itself. I know of alot of companies who click on their competitors ads, and Google doesn't really mind since they are making money on it. They do stop counting after a certain amount of clicks from the same IP address though.

I know of SEO companies who have scripts that will click on their clients competitors Adword ads until the competitors have hit their daily max spending limit. They do this to the ads above their clients ad, and once the competitors maximum spending budget is reached,Google removes the competitors ads, and the clients ad is at the top, and the program stops.

I also know of scripts companies can install which do the same thing, but uses other computers IP addresses to click to spoof the Google and overture fraud prevention.

[pentupentropy]

I'm not sure I understand the problem. No company should be able to click through on their competitors ads that much because unless you own millions of IP's, your getting blacklisted anyway.

Google, not only has fraud prevention to stop one IP clicking multiple clickthroughs on one ad, but also has many other scripts to prevent people from wasting their BW in such a manner. One IP can only do about 500 searches per day or so before spamming. This is because they offer paid searches to companies in which if I want my own search engine with backfilled results and I need like 1,000,000 searches per month, I pay like $0.001/search or something like that.

So how are you being ripped off? I mean, are they spoofing IP addresses? I would think that big companies would detect that on their incoming traffic.

[EugeneM]

Unfortunately there's a million and one types of ppc fraud besides just clicking on the competitors ads. You can read more about it on websites dedicated to the pay per click industry like this one www.payperclickuniverse.com

As for fighting it, I would suggest you look into www.adwatcher.com which offers fraud monitoring. You can use its fraud reports to get your money back from the search engines.

[Dus10]

Originally posted by pentupentropy
I'm not sure I understand the problem. No company should be able to click through on their competitors ads that much because unless you own millions of IP's, your getting blacklisted anyway.

It doesn't take millions. Further, it is relatively easy to get a bunch of IP addresses. I have a T1 here, and they gave me 128 IPs without question. I only use five. They would have given me as many as reasonably possible given proper reasons. I use NAT, so all the client machines use one IP, but they do not monitor anything like that. So, I just tell them that I have 340 computers, and they will give me a block of 512 IP address, because that is the next number that will cover it.

Also, if you lease a dedicated server from, say Chost, or any other provider, they give you "unlimited" IP addresses. So, for $99, you can ruin your competitors marketing campaign. They may have a limit of 1,000/clicks per day, which is actually pretty high. If it is 10 cents per click, that is $100. I am not sure what the actual price is, I sure it is less than 10 cents. But a company is not going to dedicate a whole lot of money to just using Google Ads, I am sure. Eventually, Google will realize that it is the same 500 IPs clicking every day, and they are from the same IP range. They will catch it eventually. When I was 14/15, ten years ago, I did have a site with banner ads, and they were 25 cents per click. I had dial-up at the time, and with a dynamic IP given every time I dialed in, I would spend an hour every day clicking all of my banners. I would get a few checks every month for about $100 each, from different companies. I feel really bad about it now, but it shows that even a little guy can cause issues that may be unethical... well, I actually do not feel all that bad about it, in retrospect, these companies were not so ethical, themselves.

[EugeneM]

Originally posted by cheng
Guys, how to prevent Pay per click fraud? For those who dont know what it means. Its actually clicks being clicked by your competitors when you are using PPC advertising solution like adwords or yahoo. That will generate unneccessery expenses and the problem is even more fraustrating when your PPC cost is very high.

I heard of companies that lost $300,000 because of this and they cant report google or yahoo because they are afraid of being blacklisted (which i dont know why google or yahoo would want to do that)

www.ppcbook.info has a free chapter on ppc fraud that you can download. I'm sure it'll answer a lot of your questions.

[mxer210]

adwatcher.com actually is a really good program for fraud. It sends you reports on any fraud, and you can send those reports to google, yahoo, or overture and get refunded for those clicks.

[mikebaker]

More information about adwatcher is located at: http://www.trackingsoftwarereviews.com

They provide independent reviews on the top 10 tracking software available they helped me make the right decision. I HIGHLY recommend you take a look at their website before you go with any ad tracking software!

Mike Baker

[pentupentropy]

It doesn't take millions. Further, it is relatively easy to get a bunch of IP addresses. I have a T1 here, and they gave me 128 IPs without question. I only use five. They would have given me as many as reasonably possible given proper reasons. I use NAT, so all the client machines use one IP, but they do not monitor anything like that. So, I just tell them that I have 340 computers, and they will give me a block of 512 IP address, because that is the next number that will cover it.

if you have your own T1, you should have at least a half of a class c, but if you're hosting a dedicated server, the governance (ARIN) now states the IP's should be assigned or else recollected by the ISP. I didn't wanna drag that out, just point that out. I worked for a large ISP for a few years and we had a really strict IP policy because of the laws passed. In any case, I know it doesn't take millions either, but any good PPC engine (overture, google, etc) should have a lot of preventative measures in place. Anything coming from the same class should be noted by the routers/firewalls. I mean shiite, google only has what... 150,000 servers running their operation? If they can't prevent the fraud, who can?

These companies (the larger ones) have to have a trusted brand. Would you guys say that people still use it because the average, less technically inclined people don't know the risk with fraud or do you feel that you're still getting a good ROI? I mean fraud or not, even scientific american recognized that internet advertising is by far the best money can buy simply because of the abilities of programs like this to find exactly your saught after demographic.

[NeeJam]

Google don't charge if the realise the clicks are fraud ones. They only charge for the real ones, or the ones they don't notice. They were planning on releasing the figures on click fraud, i don't know if they already have but i know they were planning to release the figures.