Click Detective
In my dreams about click fraud, I'm lying on a tropical island drinking, well drinking one of those drinks with an umbrella, and psychically encouraging all my friends to click multiple times on the ads on my site, particularly the high yield ones for expensive keywords. Or even more devlishly, I've created a bot that does automated click-throughs for me and cannot be detected by those oh-so-smart search engine managers.
This is not the kind of "click fraud" that Click Detective has in mind. Click Detective wants you to worry about the ads you've purchased with Pay for Click programs such as Google AdWords. Are they being clicked by foul, villainous competitors with the goal of driving up your cost of advertising? (Or even of driving your ads off the Internet if your costs per keyword exceed your maximums...) Have those nasty competitors started a spamming campaign, or are they using technology? The search engine companies are pretty good at catching this kind of fraud, but they don't get everything, so...be paranoid.
There's nothing very complicated about the way Click Detective sets up. Once you sign up (they have a free trial), you register your "landing pages," add a small script to each landing page that calls a program on the Click Detetective server, and modify the destination URLs (but not the URLs that users see) in your Pay for Click program. The modification to the URL adds a token that the script added to your landing page picks up, so that only traffic coming from the Pay for Click ad is monitored by Click Detective.
Two questions arise: what kind of analysis does Click Detective do with the information, and what can you do with it? Good questions. The first, of course, is proprietary, but no doubt involves analytic tweaks on IP logging. (You know the IP the click came from, if you get a lot from the same IP it looks funny.) Does Click Detective add a cookies for tracking purposes? I don't know, ask them. (If they tell me, I will post the info.) You could do this stuff yourself without having to pay a monthly fee for the service, and without executing an offsite black-box program.
Suppose Click Detective comes back with the goods, there's this user that's been clicking many times on a Google ad to get to your site. What then? Well, you can pursue the panoply of legal resources, notifying Google, ISPs, etc. Google does take this kind of thing very seriously.
If you want to deal with the spamming user who is visitng your site yourself, using the tools that Click Detective provides (once again, there's nothing here you couldn't do on your own), you can send them a message telling them you know they've been here before and asking them to bookmark the site. Messages increase in severity until they can't open the page without actually typing in its direct URL. But suppose I don't want to bookmark your site, I just want to visit it via the ad I know about? Well, if you are a Web merchant, that's your call -- it is kind of like people hanging around a candy store to read the magazines. Eventually, they'll buy something.
You can't blame this concept on Silicon Valley, it is based in the United Kingdom, but I sure wish I could: there's got to be a better place to put all this effort.
Posted by Harold Davis at January 20, 2005 09:01 AM
