The Many Ugly Faces of Click Fraud

If you are spending any money on keyword buys Click Fraud is something that you should be keeping an eye out for. The Search Engines are doing what they can to protect their clients and prevent Click Fraud. But like anything else, once the Search Engines get on top of it, the hackers are only more determined to find new, more sophisticated ways of tricking the Search Engines.

The Many Ugly Faces of Click Fraud
1. - Unhealthy Competition Clicks - Your not-so-honest competitors spend up your ad budget by clicking on your link time and time again.

2 - Unsavory AdSense Site Owners' Clicks - AdSense site owners have financial incentive for links on their sites to be clicked. For that reason, some can't resist the temptation to click around, make themselves a few dollars and spend your ad budget.

3 - Paid Clicks - This may be urban legend but there have been articles about AdSense site owners paying people in other developing countries to click on their links.

4 - Bots/Automated Clicks - Why take the time to click on your competitors or your AdSense links when it is much easier to create a program that runs through and automatically clicks the links for you. This has gotten so sophisticated that now not only can these programs click the links automatically but they can also launch the link into a non-browser application (e.g email).

5 - Impression Fraud - This is an even more devious way for competitors to negatively affect your Search Engine spending. Your ranking (and what you pay to achieve that ranking) are not solely based on your bid. Your CTR affects your ranking (and if it drops below 0.5% your keywords could be de-activated). Based on this knowledge, a new form of fraud, impression fraud has been born. Competitors can search on terms that they know you are paying for and NOT click your link. This lowers your CTR and therefore increases the amount that you must spend for a position.

So what can a person do to find out if their campaigns are victims of Click Fraud?

1. Make Your Campaigns Trackable - There is no difference in the referrer information in your log file between a paid visitor and an organic result visitor. This means there is no way to distinguish between the two different types of visitors in when you analyze your traffic.

You must set your campaigns up to be trackable by modifying the Destination URL. You don't have to create new pages for this campaign traffic but you do have to add tracking codes to your Destination URLs. To do this, you simply take your page name, for example www.yourdomain.com/index.asp and add tracking codes to the end of the page name after a '?' for example, www.yourdomain.com/index.asp?source=google&adid=1234.

These codes can be whatever you want. I do recommend using source if you are running campaigns on more than one Search Engine. (Note: If your site is dynamic, you do want to make sure that you are not using a code that is already being used by your Web site to determine your page content).

2. Compare Your Campaign To Your Other Traffic - You'll need to understand what is currently going on on your site to be able to detect strange things are happening. You also need to be able to break out your campaign information from all of your traffic for comparison.

Once you have your campaign traffic broken out, here are a few things to look for:

Campaign Traffic that shows a high percentage of short visits (bounce) with a low average time on site. The good thing is that this is likely not Click Fraud. This is a common result of a campaign that is interesting and appealing, yet does not take a visitor to targeted enough content. The simple fix to this is to make your creative more descriptive and then take the visitor to a page with more information about the product or service you describe in your ad (not your home page).

Campaign Traffic that shows a high percentage of short visits (bounce) with a high average time on site should be a red flag. If a high percentage of your campaign traffic (e.g. 75-80%) leave you site almost immediately, it is not logical that the average time on your site would be high unless the visitors who were interested in the site stayed on your site for a really, really long time. This would indicate, then, that the campaign was actually good and effective, however there is something going on that is causing the high percentage of short visits (bounce). That something could be Click Fraud.

In order to prove this, you must did a little deeper. Look for any of the following results from that campaign:

No Page Views - Any human traffic should account for at least one page view.

No Keywords - If you have opted out of the Content Network option for this campaign, all of your campaign traffic should be coming to your site from search results pages, so you would logically expect there to be keywords in your log files.

No Referrer - Since you are paying for traffic to your site from another site, there logically should not any traffic from the campaign with no referrer. The exception to this is if someone bookmarked the page. The bookmark would retain the tracking codes and therefore be seen as traffic from the campaign. I would expect this would be a relatively low percentage of the traffic. Also, you could double-check this by seeing if the number of visitors were greater than the number of clicks.

Strange Geographical Traffic - One easy to spot red flag is an increase in traffic from countries where you know that you are not running campaigns. If you see a large percentage of campaign traffic from countries where you know that you are not running your campaign that is almost always a sign that there is some Click Fraud going on.

Once you found your proof (any or a few of the signs listed above), contact your Search Engine account/customer service representative and inform them that you suspect that your campaigns are experiencing Click Fraud. You can provide them your proof and ask for a refund.

Campaigns, Keyword Buys and Common Sense

Successful campaigns and keyword buys boil down to one factor - common sense. Compare a common approach to a common sense approach.

Common Approach
Bid on lots of keywords and hope for the best.

Common Sense Approach
1. Analyze Campaigns
2. Find Top Performing Campaigns
3. Fix Under Performing Campaigns
4. Re-anaylzye Campaigns
5. Weed out Non and Under Performing Campaigns
6. Re-analyze Campaigns
7. Congratulate Yourself on Money Well Spent

If your approach to keyword campaign management seems to be more the Common Approach than the Common Sense Approach, don't feel bad. You are not alone.

The good news is that switching to the Common Sense Approach is easier than you think. Let me break it down.

1. Analyze Campaigns - You can't improve what you don't measure. You need analyze your web site traffic to determine which of your campaigns are effective, which campaigns have potential, which campaigns are not performing and which may actually be suffering from the effects of click fraud (look for more information on click fraud in upcoming postings).

Just looking at the report that the Search Engines provide is not enough. You need more detail to effectively analyze the campaigns. You need to analyze your web site traffic.

2. Find Top Performing Campaigns - Your top performing campaigns will be easy to spot. Indicators of top performing campaigns are total revenue by campaign, highest conversion rate by campaign and ROI (total revenue/total cost). You should also look for Campaigns with the Highest Potential. Indicators of high potential campaign are high conversion rate and high average time on site.

3. Fix Campaigns That Can Be Fixed - Once you begin your analysis, you will be able to tell why the top performing campaigns are the top performing campaigns. You need to apply what is working with your successful campaigns to try to improve your lesser and non performing campaigns. This is important not only to improve ROI but also because campaigns that do not maintain an 0.5% CTR will be disabled. Additionally the position that you achieve is based not only on your bid but a combination of your bid and your CTR rate.

The number one key factor in a successful campaign is meeting your visitors expectations. Your visitor has already searched for something on the Search Engine, they don't want to have to start that search all over again when they get to your site. So, unless someone is searching specifically for information about your company, don't send them to your home page.

Also the more descriptive your campaign content is, the more likely it is that your campaign will be successful. Some tips include using the keyword in the headline combined with an action or emotion type word. Also if your products have a unique feature, e.g. luxury sports car, make sure to include a descriptive word in your heading.

4. Reanalyze Campaigns - Now that you've made changes, you need to reanalyze your campaigns to find out if your changes had the positive effects that you expected. Again, don't just look at the report provided to you by the Search Engine. Use your web site analytics.

5. Weed Out Non-Performing Campaigns - Cut your losses! There are few ways to weed out campaigns though. You will find that perhaps some campaigns just were not effective at all. You can turn those campaigns off (unless the Search Engine has already done that for you). There are some campaigns that are okay, that just contain some non-performing keywords.

For this you need to look a little deeper. If those non-performing keywords don't have a good potential (high conversion rate), you may want to just remove those. For those keywords that have potential, you can edit the keyword and lower your bid.

6. Reanalyze Your Campaign - Again. Things should be looking a bit brighter now.

7. Congratulate Yourself - Your Work Has Paid Off!