Click Fraud

August 18, 2007 on 1:15 pm | In Questions and Comments | 1 Comment

Tony, can you give us any information on click fraud.  Have you experienced this type of fraud in any of your adverstising?  How would you go about preventing it?  Or do you do anything at all?  

On the average, how many clicks would you allow on a campaign before it started making money to realize something is going on?

If anyone else would like to comment on this thread that would be great.

Terri

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  1. Terri,

    This is a very difficult question to answer definitively. Search engines claim they have procedures in place to identify fraudulent clicks, advertisers claim those procedures are inadequate. I don’t know how to settle the question, but my sense is that search engines can’t possibly identify all fraudulent traffic, but that advertisers are also a little quick to blame low conversion rates on bogus clicks.

    The bottom line for me is, I don’t worry about it. However low or high the level of fraudulent clicks is, its a built-in cost for now. Just keep calculating your ROI and if you aren’t making money (does it matter if its click fraud or not, if you can’t prove it or do anything about it?) move on to something else.

    A bigger problem for me has been bid-shilling, but don’t ask me to talk much about that. I don’t want to be accused of giving instructions if I explain just how bid-shilling can be done effectively in a pay-for-performance environment. If you think somebody is doing this to you (its pretty obvious if you are paying attention) call the search engine and complain loudly. Most search networks don’t have policies yet, but like eBay, they will eventually be forced to address the issue.

    As for the number of clicks to generate before making a decision on a campaign, I don’t really go by clicks.  I try to keep my spend under 2 to 5 times the expected commission for each commissionable event.  In other words, if the program I am advertising pays me $5 per download, I would spend between $10 and $25 before giving up if there are no commissions.  If I do get commissions, but not enough to turn a profit, I lower my bids and/or try to improve my ad(s).  That’s the short version, anyway.  If you are working on a percentage commission its tougher.  If you can find out the average sale amount for the program (many networks provide this) you can calculate a average per commission amount and use that 2 to 5 rule with that.  If you can’t get that information, or simply don’t want to be doing all these calculations, I guess I’d just recommend between 200 and 500 clicks, at least, but its not the right metric to focus on for this decision, really.

    Tony

    Comment by Administrator — August 19, 2007 #

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