Click Fraud Network

I would like to talk about, what I call, community click fraud solutions, and why I think they are a better answer to the click fraud problem than stand alone solutions.

What is a Community Click Fraud Solution?

A community solution is where lots of advertisers pool their data about invalid clicks and low quality visits and allow it to be centrally analysed.  The larger the statistical sample, the better the resultant data.

The data is then used to help detect and stop click fraud by developing algorithms to spot invalid clicks and to help identify difficult areas such as click bot attacks, click farm members and MFA sites.  I plan to talk about these three subjects in detail in future posts, but in brief, a click bot is a computer program which clicks on ads, a click farm is a group of people paid to click on ads and an MFA or made for advert site is a domain which does nothing but show ads, they tend to generate only low quality clicks.

At the root of the Click Fraud Network™ is of course it’s community click fraud solution.  With 4000+ subscribers, the Network is able to get a massive statistical sample to better analyse trends.

The data collected by the Click Fraud Network is used to protect it’s members advertising budget and it is also published to the wider search engine marketing community through the Click Fraud Index™.

What is a stand alone solution?

As the name suggests, stand alone solutions work in isolation of any other domain’s data.  Whilst the click fraud solution may be centrally hosted each block of data collected is used alone without reference to the other data which is being collected.

I am in no way deprecating the position of standalone solutions to solve the click fraud problem; rather I am highlighting the benefit of a large data sample with which to spot problems.

The Problem

Pay per click suppliers jealously guard their data, and the lack of transparency makes it very hard to get a real analysis of the invalid click problem.

Community click fraud solutions are solving the problem by creating their own analysis.  This work often comes under scrutiny by the search engines and they claim the analysis is not correct, and the analysis methods are not correct.  I say let us see OUR data generated by OUR clicks if you have a problem with a third party analysis of the problem.

The Pros

The pros of working together with a community of other organisations is that a far larger body of data is collected and shared, and as a result it is easier to spot the following:

• Click bots
• Click Farms
• Made For Ads
• Pulisher click fraud
• Competitor click fraud

The Cons

Loss of control of your data.  Using a community approach, third parties have access to your data.  It is advisable that you have complete trust in any community click fraud solution you are intending to join.

In Conclusion

Until the search engines open their data sets to external scrutiny, there is no way that advertisers can be sure that every click is valid, and that the pay per click supplier filters work correctly.