Marketing Pilgrim - Latest Comments in Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

JT Smith ✓ — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 14:55:21 -0000

Nowadays, I think they are way worse. Botnets and click farms have taken over the display network. One account I work on was getting large proportions of click fraud, and we're talking pretty large volumes of clicks.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Cufflinks — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:45:16 -0000

I have used google ads before and have often wondered how many of the click I paid for were in fact click fraud

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Flat Sceen TV Mounts — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:38:26 -0000

agf

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Flat Sceen TV Mounts — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:37:46 -0000

test

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Levels of Poor Service — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:42:09 -0000

Hate to say it do you believe in the tooth fairy or free pizza and beer ?
Wherever money and schemers are together it does not take too long for ideas of the "easy and softer way " to arise and develop
Some even enjoy or prefer to earn their money this way
To put it another way - figures don't lie but liars figger

Levels of Poor Service's last blog post..pizza e. (1.0/5) on Yelp.com

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

prasad — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:57:56 -0000

i think there some element of click fraud on google we had given www.tendertiger.com add on google we do received some invalid and dummy click
regards
prasad

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Metro Services Wpg — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:03:37 -0000

lots of coloured graphs and charts that i do not understand
The simple answer to all of this "Do you believe in the tooth fairy ?"

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Flickr — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:22:05 -0000

That's only the invalid clicks they caught. From our experience, it's much higher and Google's customer service staff fight hard to deny any compensations or responsibilities.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Avi — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:39:41 -0000

After we installed a tracking code in our web pages, we found that 75% of Google's clicks were frauds.
We got massive amount of clicks from different countries in hours that people sleep there!
Google placed our adds along with Sex ads and Tourist guides...(we make scientific instrumentation).
Within 24 hours after we complained, all of those clicks disappeard. That clearly shows that Google got a hand in those clicks.
Our monthly bill is now 75% lower with no effect on our sales.
Webmasters, don't let them cheat you!

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Andrew Goodman — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:17:55 -0000

Wow, that was scientific.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

doug — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:42:35 -0000

Google Crick Fraud is 20-30% based on my own experience with adsense. Of course Google would say it is low. Does anyone actually believe Matt Cutts and Google's PR machine.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Selin — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:56:13 -0000

Even so, 2% is still too much.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Chris Longwell — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:23 -0000

As popularized by Mark Twain. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Chris Longwell — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:53:32 -0000

As a business owner that is just getting started in online advertising...one thing is for sure. Google does not make small businesses feel comfortable with using there services. I would be willing to say the majority of advertisers are small businesses like mine with small advertising budgets. Google put the onerous on business to come to them with all the information. Their training talks about knowing all your competitors ip addresses. The click fraud "training," if you can call it that, talks to you like your 10 years old and do not have the intelligence to understand what Google does to combat it. "Little Jimmy....little Jimmy are you listening. Don't you know little Jimmy that not all clicks are fraudulent clicks." The entire tutorial was them trying to convince me to not pursue because there is nothing to pursue. Give me a break!

The other thing that bugs me is how people let companies like Google and Apple off the hook. "You can't talk that way about our precious Google and Apple! We believe everything they say is true...because they are not Microsoft." Any publicly traded company is going to do WHATEVER is necessary to keep up the bottom line. Including showing us silly pictures like the one posted in the article with the three circles. Wake up! That's insulting!

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Gary Beal — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:36:28 -0000

I spoke with Adam at SES London 2008 yesterday and he shed some light on duplication across multiple websites showing up across multiple Google SE's. He explained that its not a negative factor except when there are high multiple instances of it.

He also mentioned multiple 301's in a short time span may have implications as well.

Thanks Adam!

GaryTheScubaGuy

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Joe Williams — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:22:30 -0000

Just got banned by AdSense for making too much money on Feb 19, 2008. All websites that we had were generic business websites and everything was legal. Google Adsense's email indicated a 'bad business model'. Our translation is 'We are paying you too much money'. Go figure. We had been up and running for over a year until our websites were getting noticed by Alexa.com and Google AdSense's mysterious partners.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

anonomous — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:57:30 -0000

My fraud clicks are 6% but would be much higher if i used adsence.

I can only guess the good man Andy was expecting all this apposing feedback.

"Actually the reported 2% invalid clicks come simply from complaints buy advertisers".
As an advertiser myself,I only report about 1% of my estimated 6%. Its just a hassle, (like getting minutes credited for a dropped call). I think thats also one reason 'Google Analytics' wont report the ip addresses.
We spend a simple $40,000 a yr on Google This figure does not including customers you're charged for, that click on you two or three times in teh same day, for example if the customer needs to re-contact you they often will re-google you and re-click you.

Theres many things Google could do to give us more accurate information and results. Many feel if they do this they would loose millions. A general belief is you only give your customer better service when your forced to by competition, and currently Google has no competitor that offers thees options. But the ROI is much greater foe my company then the blood sucking yellow pages lol.(die) In that comparison I'm very happy.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Jim Jansen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:14:30 -0000

You know, upon reflecting on this article, the only way to really know the click fraud rate is to run an experiment between a trusted third party and the search engine.

This the only way to get all three data points in the same place -- the content provider, the search engine, and the attacker.

Basically, set-up fake online stores with sponsored search accounts. Then, attack these online stores with various click fraud techniques over a period of time.

Then compare logs from the Websites, the search engines, and the attacker logs.

Jim

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Andrew Goodman — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:26:09 -0000

Jim, I can't help but notice you cite your own article. Looks like you've done a lot of interesting research relevant to online marketers, user experience analysis, etc. I sympathize with the plight you must face in presenting reliable "trend analysis" in the context of some of these publication processes -- for example one of your articles from 2006 is covering long-defunct user experiences from search engines like Excite, Alltheweb; references to user interactions with Yahoo as "directory-based," and so on. The references seem to be 5-7 years out of date by the time they are published.

As to what constitutes an "academic research article," we will have to disagree. This looks to me like a short unrefereed overview article in a magazine. Some of your other articles conform more closely to the norm of a refereed journal article that would be worthy of the title of "academic research article."

Here, I don't see the research. I see some decent common-sense definitions and terse recommendations and conclusions. But no independent data or critical insight.

@hlawton: Any decent analytics package, such as Google Analytics, will give you bounce rates by keyword, and time spend on site by keyword, if that's what you want.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Jim Jansen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:15:14 -0000

Here is a URL to an academic research article on this subject -- http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_...

Reference: Jansen, B. J. (2007) Click fraud, IEEE Computer. 40(7), 85-86

I do not believe that the 2% applies to content ads.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

trademark registration — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 02:21:13 -0000

Even so, 2% is still too much. Some company's advertising is in the hundreds of thousands. That quickly adds up to thousands of dollars that go to fraudulent clicks. It's kind of scary to think about.

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Gry Gabrielle, WebDesigner — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:33:43 -0000

My suggestion is simple:

Just make sure you never go for any other channels than the search results in google.xxx because the fraud is not from your colleges, its from hungry AdSense sites.

Actually we where closed out by our Google Adsense testing, because our colleges in our local network was clicking on adds, and at that time we didnt now that (our colleges) and we went from PR5 to PR4 some days later.

Thats why we decided AdSense didnt make sense for us. I Assume theres a army of AdSense sites who wants to earn money, and they are asumeably very creative in their ways to make webdesign and have people clicking. Random AdWords Roboting who dont target your own pool but only occasionaly i have been reading about. I Love Google, that why i love to critize also, likewise with my husband... :-)

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Michael Samuel — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:38:58 -0000

I stopped PPC advertising because of the click fraud problem! I think Google should protect its advertisers more than that...

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

hlawton — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:37:04 -0000

Are Google, Yahoo and MSN robbing you?

Why PPC waste/fraud is still continuing and why Google, Yahoo and MSN won’t help you find it.

I have spent time looking at all the reports Google/Yahoo/MSN have been providing it’s customers for some time now.

The one report that none of them provide is “Length of Visit by Keyword”.

This is a report that would help anyone with managing PPC campaigns in a major way.

So, why is this report not supplied by any of the search engines out there?

It’s simple!

If you knew which keywords people were clicking on and then just jumping out you could adjust you spending on those keywords accordingly.

All the major search engines have the data and tools available to provide you with this report.

I also believe that with the data that most of the major search engines collect that they could even provide us with a much better report than the “Length of Visit by Keyword” report I’ve been talking about.

I would love to see the raw data that Google collects on the sponsored ad clicks.

I bet if any of us could analyze that data we would save tons of money on our campaigns.

As a side note…
Wouldn’t you love to know what products have the best conversion rates and lowest advertising costs? Google and the others have this information. What power these people have!

Another note…
Google and the others know what products don’t sell well over the internet. They could come up with a list of products that have never sold well over the internet and at least warn people before they waste your money. I think a large percentage of people who try to sell something over the internet are wasting their money and I’m including the people who really know what their doing.

They won’t help us with this critical data because they know once you see the waste you will adjust your advertising campaigns to reduce it. That would cost the major search engines billions of dollars once you do.

Google and the others are basically hoping people don’t figure this out. Their saying lets give the customers a bunch of reports and analytics and hope they never notice what we’re not giving them.

The report should at least contain:
IP Address, Date/Time, Search term, Campaign keyword(s), Length of Visit, Number Pages Viewed, Conversion.

All the major search engines are guilty of not providing its customers with this information.

I have been looking for a tracking site that provides this information but have not had much luck.

I’m sure I could find a service or piece of code out there that will provide the important data but why we are not getting these reports from the major search engines out there is a crime.

Harvey Lawton

Re: Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

انمي — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 13:43:58 -0000

tanks