How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

[pcdoc]

Cauff was a victim of "click fraud," the illicit manipulation of keyword-based advertising. In this case, the scam appeared straightforward - one company clicked on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud.html

[kyle422]

"All you have to do to make some money is find a way to click the ad sent by Google or Yahoo! to your own Web page," says search marketing consultant Joseph Holcomb. "Click! - there's 10 bucks. Click! - there's 10 bucks. It goes on all the time."
Wow, ten buck clicks. I don't think that there are too many people making $10 off a single adsense click.

[Las Vegas]

lol

[webmaster]

He is referencing adsense. We as advertisers get paid when someone clicks on one of our contextual ads. Unless we are talking about "mesothelioma" I doubt anyone is making anywhere near that on clicks. Meh!

[SkiRE]

It's an excerpt from the article link posted above...

What they are saying is that if site A hosts adsense ads from google for site B and someone click on those ads site A gets a portion of the PPC price that site B was willing to pay for a click. In certain areas like medicine PPC prices can be as high as $50/click. So making $10 a click is easy if you can get traffic. Think about it...if you can get high priced ads from google on your site and rank your site in yahoo and msn for those terms...then you can get lots of clicks to related adsense advertisers and google will pay you money.

The other thing that's common is if Site B has a daily budget of say $200...they will be gone from the PPC results in 4 clicks ($50 X 4)...and the ads below them then move up. So people go and click their competitors ads, eat up the daily budget and get their site ranked higher for less money.

Google and Yahoo have detection for certain types of click behavior....like tracking the IP...which is effective against regular internet users abusing the system...but for someone who knows how to cloak their IP and make themselves look like they are somewhere they are not then it becomes more difficult to track.

Hope that helps

The way we have found to avoid this issue was to not use the content network option and only have our ads show in the google reults. That won't stop your competitiors from clicking your ads but it will avoid the scams that go on with adsense ad providers.

It's also a good idea to use a page that only the PPC ads can access...this makes it easier for you to spot the PPC in your logs and check for any other abuse.

[kensmith]

$50 for one click...wow and I thought $3.50 was high.

[Oppenheimer Group]

Terms like California mortgage and California Refinance were in excess of $75 per click earlier this year.

[Fort Lauderdale]

Yes, some terms in Fort Lauderdale are up there too!

john