Click Fraud Red Flags...and Some Antidotes

[mandy]

Cures for Click Fraud: Some Antidotes
There are those who argue that it is not in the major search engines' interest to clamp down hard on their partner sites, given that they produce so much revenue. When asked how much money Google makes from domain traffic, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO once answered, "A lot of money." According to Jon Lisbon, Wall Street estimated that half of Google's $6 billion in revenue for 2005 was generated from partner sites. This has lead to antidotes and precautions that are being implemented against click fraud by advertisers, search engines and third parties. They include:

    * Website Analysis: The is the first and most important line of defense. Business Week reported that one company was so tired of being ripped off with bogus clicks costing up to $8 each, that it had an in-house programmer design a system to check every click on company ads, the Web page where the ad appeared, the clicker's country, length of visit and conversion rate, which the owner reviews on a daily basis. While this is a time- consuming and expensive antidote, it works, although unfortunately it may not be practical for the small Web shop owner. Still, there are other methods that are effective.

    * Referral Traffic Tracking: Lisbon advises his clients to manage content networks very closely and monitor referral traffic, such as individual publishers, domains and so on that are part of search engine content networks. "The search engines can help advertisers by unmasking content and search partners. Many publishers in the content network mask their referral URLs, so even with referral reporting, advertisers cannot see what sites are sending traffic," said Lisbon. "I see that as part of the holy grail of improving performance. Once we can see the individual search partners, we can opt-out of the poor performers."...

full article: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions...hp/3679166