Google Strikes Back Against Click Fraud Claims
August 9, 2006 | 2 Comments
I have substantial experience with advertising tracking technologies including click fraud analysis. While working for Direct Response Technologies, I spent a year as the lead developer on their Direct Track product. We spent a substantial amount of time tracking and analyzing claims of click fraud, but in most cases our system identified fraudulent clicks properly, yet we still spent a fair amount of time double and triple checking the numbers with our many clients.
Google has it infinitely worse.
For months we’ve been hearing about problems with click fraud and many crazy numbers in relation to Google Adwords. As a Google AdSense publisher these complaints have scared me. Over the last six months my traffic has continued to increase, yet my ECPM and CTR numbers have declined drastically. I could only assume Google was bending to their paying Adwords customers and eliminating valid clicks while fear and anxiety on the advertisers’ part was reducing overall per click payouts. This trend has been fairly consistent amongst many of my friends, some have recently been seeing their ECPM dip below the $1.00 mark.
However, careful analysis from Google has been released that defies many of the claims of click fraud. In a 17 page white paper released on August 8th, Google shows clearly how these fraud numbers are misrepresented, trumped up, and just plain wrong. Many of the methodologies click fraud companies are using do not properly track numbers, nor verify their claims against what Google actually tracked. In one example given, AdWatcher claimed there were approximately 12,000 fraudulent clicks in a time period when Google only tracked 6800 and had already identified and eliminated 800 as fraud.
Hopefully this detailed report will get adequate press coverage and publishers can start seeing Google earnings start to increase to respectable levels again. It is my strong opinion that if you are not getting between $2 and $3 ECPM for real content, you are being screwed. It would be nice to feel good about my Google ads again and not be shopping around at Yahoo, Commission Junction, and Blog Ads.
Tags: adsense, advertiser, advertising, adwords, affiliate, blog ads, blogads, cj, click fraud, commission junction, cpm, ctr, direct response technologies, direct track, directtrack, ecpm, fraud, google, google adsense, google adwords, internet advertising, internet marketing, performance, publisher
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress