Even as we approach the end of 2008, click fraud is still something that needs to be dealt with in the search engine advertising industry. Google takes a number of precautions to keep it under control though.
This isn’t really news, but Google’s AdWords Help Center details a number of these things that the company does. For one, they employ detection and filtering techniques. “Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports,” says the Help Center.
Real-time systems filter out activity fitting a profile of invalid behavior (such as excessively repetitive clicks), and Clicks and impressions from known sources of invalid activity are automatically discarded.
They have advanced monitoring techniques. “Various unique and innovative methods are applied at each stage of the filtering process, thereby maximizing proactive detection of invalid activity. Our engineers are also constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters, and examining a growing set of signals,” the Help Center notes.
Google also talks a little bit about how their team uses specialized tools and techniques to ensure it is difficult and unrewarding for people to commit click fraud. They refer to a detailed report from an “independent expert” who examines Google’s methods.
Abby Johnson talked to Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety at Google in a recent interview from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago. He offers some further interesting insight into the world of Click Fraud.
Advertisers are the ones who really have to worry about Click Fraud, but luckily Google makes the problem far less of one compared to what it could be, as AdWords has a huge user base, and they make it pretty hard to get away with. Another good thing as Ghosemajumder points out in the video, is that the keys to preventing click fraud are the same keys to increasing ROI.
