Google Claims That Click Fraud Is Very Low

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Despite what others claim, Google thinks their click fraud rate is quite low. This subject is unlikely to be taken at face value, because of the nature of click fraud, and how integral fraud-checking would be to the core of Adsense system. Google knows how important the perception of low click-fraud rates is, so they went into great detail explaing to Andy Beal how they’ve arrived at figure of 2%. That would mean they company is, as is being claimed, “98% Click fraud free.”

Beal outlines the 4 levels of filtering that Google goes through:

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 final filter is Google runs an investigation into suspected click fraud accounts.

Donna Bogatin at ZDnet took a dim view of the post, and tends to think it was all marketing. It’s not a claim that is complete foreign to Google. In fact, subtle marketing seems to be one of their greatest strengths. The whole issue to Bogatin is what Google defines a “invalid clicks” and what they define as “valid clicks”. As with so many issue in Google, Google gets to define these terms with no input from others.

She mentions click fraud audits and wonders when we’ll see them. So far Yahoo and Google have both resisted efforts to allow anyone to audit their data. The trend is likely to continue. The issue of click fraud promises to get more and more interest everday. With Adwords on pace to do $10 billion in 2007, the confirmed 2% fraud rate already indicates that click fraud totals $200,000,000.00 alone at Google. The numbers MIGHT be even higher, depending on who you believe and what methodology people use to investigate the issue.

Via: Beanstalk

What do you think of this whole click fraud issue?

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.