I'm just out of the Click Fraud session where we had Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google, Jon Myers from MediaVest and Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media presenting.
I scribbled notes on Google Docs. The whole conference centre is safely blanketed with wi-fi.
Let's start with Google. While running through the different click fraud strategies (attempts to do it, rather than prevent it) Shuman noted that there were regional fashions.
Automated approachs such as click bots and botnets are more common in Eastern Europe than elsewhere in the world.
Click farms (manual labour) are more popular in India and China.
Pay-per-click sites (in which people are paid to click on ads) are more common in United States and Canada than elsewhere in the world.
Shuman also noted that Google disqualifies just under %10 of all clicks as fraud. That's a huge amount of clicks for Google to refund. Although... Google doesn't actually refund most of those clicks. The vast majority of click fraud, Google says, is caught by their algorithms at the point of click and the advertiser is never charged in the first place.
Google does engage in reactive and manual investigations - these are the type that are set up with a significant client complains. Here they'll use human skill as well as algorithms to examine what had happened (rather than catching something live).
Less than 0.02% of click fraud is found via these reactive manual investigations.
Here's a breakdown of Google's anti-click fraud steps:
- Proactive
- Filters
- Automated algorithms which filter out in real time
- Analyze all clicks
- Accounts for vast majority of invalid click detection
- Offline Analysis
- Automated algorithms and manual analysis
- Focused on the adsense network
- Accounts for a smaller percentage than the filters
- Reactive
- Investigations
- All advisers inquiries are investigated by the traffic quality team
- Invalid click percentage is a negligible slice compared to #1 and #2
- Relatively rare (<0.02%)
Rushing off to the next sessions; updates to follow.
