Defying the third-party firms that sell themselves to customers amid claims of greater incidents of click fraud, as much as 20 or 30 percent, a Google executive claimed the actual rate is only about 2 percent.
We’ve heard from Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, this past August during SES San Jose. The issue of click fraud became an entertaining and sometimes combative topic during the conference.
He called a trio of companies out to Main Street for a showdown at high noon, claiming their methodology was flawed. The clicks they cited as fraudulent were never counted by Google as legitimate.
The best part of that story was how it wasn’t made public until right before Ghosemajumder took part in a panel at SES San Jose about auditing paid listings and click fraud issues. Instead he stated that Google wasn’t “saying that (third-party firms’) methodology is flawed,” regarding the three companies he singled out for attention.
Now Andy Beal has revealed how Ghosemajumder took him aside during the recently completed SES Chicago and gave him the real story on click fraud.
“The click fraud rate – as discovered by most AdWords advertisers – is on average, less than 2% of all clicks through Google’s system,” Beal wrote.
As proof, Ghosemajumder demonstrated to Beal why 2 percent was the real deal:
He explains how Google has a four-stage process in identifying and filtering what it calls “invalid clicks”. Google’s definition of invalid clicks includes non-fraudulent clicks (such as a visitor genuinely clicking an AdWords ad more than once) and “click fraud” (those clicks that are obviously not legitimate).
Google utilizes four layers of click fraud detection. The first layer is purely automatic and is used to filter clicks from both “search” and AdSense partners (contextual ads). This filter is able to detect invalid clicks in real-time, with the goal of removing them before they ever show up in the AdWords console.
The second and third layers are aimed at filtering only AdSense clicks. The second layer is what Google calls its “flagging system” and is an automatic process to remove invalid clicks from the AdWords system. The third layer of filtering is a “manual review” process with more than two dozen Google employees manually reviewing and removing any suspicious clicks.
The fourth stage involved the advertisers and the third-party click-fraud fighting companies. While Ghosemajumder would not confirm an exact number, he did note that Beal was “on the right track” in determining actual click fraud reaching advertisers and requiring an investigation was one to two percent.
If this is correct, and third party firms are inaccurately counting illicit clicks (and that has to be the case if Google thinks the number is 2 percent or less), two things happen now. One, click fraud detection companies have to justify their business model to clients. And two, advertisers need to choose whom to believe about click fraud, Google or the third party firms.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
