In the 1800's,
cattle rustlers of the open-range era were generally cowboys who had
drifted into unlawful practices. They knew the cattle country and were
adept at roping, branding, and trailing. These outlaws needed only to
buy a few cows, register a brand, and begin branding stray cattle. The
altering of brands was a frequent practice among rustlers.
So,
what does cattle rustling, a crime of the past, have to do with click
fraud? Well, cattle rustling, like click fraud is not a crime of the
past - it has not been solved. Texas law enforcement officers
identified 5 million to 6 million stolen cattle in 2006 at more than
125 Texas livestock markets. Why? Because there is still a financial
incentive to steal cattle as there is to commit click fraud – but in
the case of cattle rustling, industry cooperation and initiatives have
ensured the days of the wild, wild west are history.
Today,
spammers, phishers, and click fraudsters - like cattle rustlers -
register accounts and domains and alter online brands to commit crimes
against online consumers, sites, and advertisers.
Similar crimes, new platforms.
I've
spent the past 16 years in software development, product management,
operations, and research and development focused on risk management and
fraud detection on extremely large transaction platforms, including
leading the design and implementation of eBay's first proactive fraud
detection system in 1999. The company's real-time systems are used to
detect suspicious and potentially fraudulent activity, potential
copyright/trademark issues, and help enforce policies and rules in the
eBay community.
As
the Sr. VP of Product Strategy for Click Forensics, I'm now focused on
the detection and mitigation of a similar problem - click fraud for
online advertisers. Please notice I did not use the word solve.
"Lessons to Learn from Spam"
On
January 24, 2004, Bill Gates announced to the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland "Two years from now, spam will be solved." In
December 2006, the New York Times reported that "Antispam companies
fought the scourge successfully, for a time, with a blend of three
filtering strategies. Their software scanned each e-mail and looked at
whom the message was coming from, what words it contained and which Web
sites it linked to. The new breed of spam - call it Spam 2.0 - poses a
serious
challenge
to each of those three approaches." They were right. According to
Postini, in 2006 spam rose 147 percent and made up 94 percent of all
e-mail messages.
Like
other fraud problems faced in the past, spam was a technology problem
companies believed could be solved by a few smart people in white coats
with unlimited resources. This basic premise has proven flawed time and
time again as fraud cannot be solved when there is significant economic
incentive to commit it. Rather, it can only be mitigated by
cross-company and industry cooperation and with the development of
sophisticated detection systems which continually and quickly adapt.
The
same applies to click fraud. Click fraud is not a problem one search
engine can solve. It is an industry-wide issue that needs the
cooperation of search engines, advertisers and third-party monitoring
companies - like other advertising mediums such as television, radio
and print, have.
"Even if they fixed those problems, they're not actually measuring click fraud"
A recent blog entry by Shuman Ghosemajumder at Google makes the following assertion:
"...
They [Click Forensics] are still trying to measure only activity
(attempted click fraud) and not advertiser impact (actual click
fraud)...they would still be counting clicks we filter (and do not
charge to advertisers) in their click fraud estimates."
Actually
the truth is Click Forensics measures and reports on all suspicious
click activity and attempted click fraud across search engines and
their content network advertising channels. Some search engines claim
they already catch these clicks. However, many of the 3,000 advertiser
members of the Click Fraud Network report that they have never been
discounted more than 2 percent for the invalid clicks. It is clear
search engines are not catching all suspicious and potentially
fraudulent activity.
A
key part of the reason is their lack of advertiser-side information and
conversion data or, put another way, what happens on the advertiser’s
site after the click.
For
example, advertisers collect rich clickstream data on each visitor to
their websites. In most cases, search engines, like Google, register an
ad click to a website and the data trail ends there. By working with
advertisers, we combine both sets of data providing deep insight into
click intent. As Dr. Tuzhilin noted when he consulted with Click
Forensics, this is one of the main reasons why third-party click fraud
monitoring companies can play an important role in helping advertisers
mitigate the click fraud activity occurring in their campaigns.
So, how does Google, Yahoo, or MSN “solve” the click fraud problem for online advertisers? The answer is they cannot solve it alone.
Take
another look at the cattle rustling problem. Ranchers, law enforcement,
and livestock markets work together as an industry and community and
closely monitor the brands of all cattle up for sale in the livestock
marketplace. If something looks suspicious, one
or more members of the community report it to the marketplace, affected
ranchers are contacted, information is shared, evidence is
investigated, and stolen cattle are quickly returned.
Sometimes the answer is right in front of you. It’s simple and it’s the right thing to do.
Kevin Embree
Sr. VP of Product Strategy
Click Forensics