Text adverts displayed next to the results of searches typed
into Google's search engine are the web giant's main source of
revenue. A problem with the adverts is the way they are billed. A
company is charged each time someone clicks on its ad to visit its
website.
While this makes for a very accountable way of advertising,
where the company pays only for those people interested in its
products or services, it is open to fraud.
A competitor could employ someone or write software to
continually click on an advert in order to force the advertiser to
pay each time. This has been used as a way to run down a
competitor's advertising budget.
Another form of click fraud focuses on AdSense, the Google
product that lets website publishers display Google ads on their
own sites. When visitors click the ads, Google shares the ad
revenue with the publisher – which is an incentive to unscrupulous
publishers to click their own ads.
Click fraud, which can affect any providers of pay-per-click
(PPC) advertising, has been the subject of lawsuits and has long
been viewed as a threat to click-through advertising if not fully
combated. As operators of the largest online advertising networks,
Google and Yahoo! have faced the most criticism.
Google has for some time published the figure that just under
10% of clicks are invalid, and could be fraudulent, which
represents up to $1 billion a year in advertising revenue.
What the company has never before revealed, though, is how many
of those invalid, or potentially fraudulent, clicks are filtered
out by its system. It now says that it stops all but 0.02% from
getting through its system, using filters and off-line analysis.
That means that only two out of every 10,000 advert clicks that are
charged for are fraudulent clicks.
"Our click quality team investigates every inquiry we receive
from advertisers who believe they may have been affected by
undetected click fraud," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's
product manager for trust and safety, on the official blog of click
advertising product AdWords.
"Many of these cases are misunderstandings, but in most cases
where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been
filtered out and not charged for by our real-time filters," said
Ghosemajumder. "Because of the broad operation of our proactive
detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being
affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of
all clicks."
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