Last month, in writing about click fraud, I had briefly touched on the idea of ‘Impression Fraud’. At the time, there had been very little talk of it, and even through today, we haven’t really seen any evidence that leads us to believe any of our clients have been a victim of this attack.

It comes as no surprise though, that this tactic is already picking up speed and gaining attention. Several sources, beginning early this month, have been talking about this. The tag being applied is ‘Keyword Hijacking’. Bots are being written to take advantage of primarily Google AdWords and the relevancy formula with that engine. These bots perform keyword searches over and over, exposing the ads, but never taking action on them. Eventually, the AdWords system makes the assumption that ’searchers’ see no value in the ad, because it’s been shown potentially thousands of times with few or no clicks.

While this won’t cost an advertiser any money directly, it is extremely damaging as it stops ad delivery. Many times, that means no one will visit an advertisers site since they’ll never know it exists. A direct impact on the bottom line.

Again, it comes down to tracking and vigilance. It’s like a mantra. Repeat it to yourself over and over; tracking and vigilance.

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Stopping Click Fraud

It’s important for agencies to take an active role in looking for and defending against click fraud. Granted, in an overall marketing/media mix, search may only be a minor percentage of the total budget, but isn’t it still imperative to maximize a client’s spend?

Aside from protecting and maximizing money though, you’ve also got to protect the brand for your clients. Often times, especially with big brands, a search campaign can often be about visibility and brand reinforcement. If you have to bring paid campaigns down because of click fraud, your whole strategy is shot.

Being aware of click fraud isn’t necessarily going to require your undivided attention, so don’t panic. The key to all of it, in fact a crucial component of any search campaign, is tracking. I’ll sing it from the mountains and yell in the valleys, you MUST track performance. In fact, I think you’ll get the same sermon from anyone in the search marketing game. The fact that you can measure countless metrics in a search campaign is one of it’s greatest strengths. If, however, you’re not tracking, then your campaign has serious holes, no matter what the strategy.

The field of conversion analytics tools is wide (disclosure – I’m closely associated with the linked site), varied, and full. Shop around, it won’t be hard to find exactly what you need.

Once tracking is in place, finding and stopping click fraud really isn’t all that difficult. Any good analytics/tracking package will help you see traffic patterns to a site. Pretty quickly, patterns will develop and you’ll have an expectation of an average day. Hopefully you’ll see jumps in traffic based on your marketing efforts. You shouldn’t see huge spikes though. Keep in mind, as I mentioned in an earlier post, a spike is generally very specific.

When you see possible fraud, the first and most important step is to stop bidding on the targeted term(s). This is a minimum step. It may be prudent to put an entire campaign on hold until you can determine the cause. Collect and analyze your traffic from log files. You should be able to see the originating IP address, the time of the visit, and the referring url. From this data, you should be able to pick out the suspicious traffic. When you’ve got a fairly thorough, and well investigated claim, PPC engines are generally very open and responsive about working with you.

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With all the recent attention, and since I promised earlier, I thought it was a good time to get into some of the different types of click fraud that appear on PPC campaigns.

Spikes

One of the most primitive and obvious methods show up as huge spikes in traffic. As long as a campaign is managed in a consistent manner, it will likely develop some predictable patterns. You’ll get an idea of how much traffic you’ve got coming and the trick then is to improve conversions. With a spike, you’ll see a huge surge in traffic, generally on a single term and from one provider at a time (e.g.; Google AdWords OR Overture, but not both).

A quick look at some basic traffic logs will show groups of clicks hitting the site, from a single ad, within seconds of each other.

These spikes are easy to point out and with just a little bit of effort, you can compile a report that will usually stand up as sufficient evidence for the engines to thoroughly investigate the account for click fraud.

Topic Spikes

These work much the same way as a normal spike, huge traffic jumps on limited terms. In the case of a Topic Spike though, there is often a news story, Internet rumor, or some other discussion going on that involves your term. Active and aggressive fraudsters will pick up on this and use the timing as an opportunity to assault your campaign. It will be much more difficult to prove the activity wasn’t related to the widespread coverage. That’s what the villians are counting on.

There are still steps to take in order to protect yourself. Don’t run ads on content networks (especially during a news cycle), analyze IPs for patterns. Compare the number of clicks you are recieving to the unique visitors you count on your site.

Perhaps most importantly, don’t be afraid to stop running ads until the storm blows over. Be very honest about your goals and your ability to convert. If all the new traffic is coming from casual searchers, are you sure you can turn them into shoppers? If not, don’t waste resources on them.

The Slow Bleed

This is the most difficult to stop, and can be infuriating, but it doesn’t have to be. A slow bleed occurs over several weeks or even months. Fraudsters, and sometimes competitors, especially on very expensive terms, will slowly click your ad, perhaps only a few times a day, with significant intervals between the clicks, to slowly take money from your account.

You have to realize going in to a campaign that this is a very real possibility. This is just another reason why tracking is so important. You’ve got to be able to determine, quickly, if you are seeing positive returns on your campaign. And that doesn’t have to necessarily mean you are making money at a rate of $5-$1. If you have specific goals in place (sign ups, contact requests, etc.), make sure you are acheiving your marks. If you can’t make your goal, you shouldn’t have your campaigns running. Re-evaluate and seek help if need be.

Impression Fraud

Impression Fraud doesn’t quite fit with click fraud, but it is related. Impression fraud isn’t nearly as prevalent as click fraud, and it’s not as directly damaging. Impression fraud is done by people with lots of extra time on their hands.

Instead of draining a budget, the goal of impression fraud is to artificially damage the credibility of your ad campaign in the eyes of the engine. The major PPC players put strong weight on the Click Through Rate (CTR) of ads, and when ads are shown often with few (or no) clicks, the engines will disable the ads.

The impression fraudsters will work to have your ad displayed several times in an effort to push the CTR below the acceptable threshold, thus keeping you from ever being seen by legitimate prospects. So far, this can almost be seen as more of a nuisance than anything, but techniques are probably becoming more sophisticated everyday.

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Click fraud has been, and continues to be, an extremely hot topic for search marketing and Internet advertising.

Recently, Pete Lerma did an article on the subject of click fraud for ClickZ. Lerma is a principal at Click Here (the Interactive Marketing division of Richard Group).

I think what stands out most is the shroud of mystery and misunderstanding that hangs over click fraud.

Mainstream press, namely Newsweek, have also started to talk about click fraud. This is obviously garnering a lot of attention and it should.

I’m not about to dismiss click fraud. It’s a serious issue. We’ve seen our clients affected by fraudulent activity so I’ll be first in line to tell you that it can happen. I don’t, however, think it’s something that has to necessarily cripple a campaign, or become a huge vacuum for ad budgets.

Thankfully, most click fraud attacks are still fairly basic and obvious. They can be spotted and dealt with fairly quickly and easily IF you’re vigilant. There’s the key though. You’ve got to understand that pay-per-click (PPC) and other online advertising strategies aren’t like traditional media. You can’t just negotiate for space and circulation then sign off on the creative you like. PPC requires active participation.

That’s why it’s so critical for agencies to either dedicate the manpower that proper management will require, or outsource this to companies that can handle PPC management. With measurement and demonstrable results becoming more and more important with every contract, it doesn’t make any sense to leave something like this to chance. Especially when click fraud can be at least contained.

There are other types of click fraud that can be damaging and are much less obvious to detect. These pose a challenge, and something of a threat, but they can still be dealt with.

I’ll get into different types of click fraud and some of the strategies to employ in another post.

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