Click Fraud Case Study – FFSearcherClick fraud includes anything that imitates a click on an advert, and fraudsters are continually coming up with novel ways to fool advertising networks into giving them money. Some of the new methods are particularly hard to spot because there is so little evidence that fraud has occurred. The behavior of the users can be almost indistinguishable from that of valid users, and this is when in depth study of click fraud techniques is needed. If you are interested in PPC advertising, you need to be aware that this will affect you. Opinions differ as to exactly how much click fraud there is in PPC advertising, but it is generally agreed to be over 10%. That means that 1 in 10 of the clicks that you pay for is invalid, and that money is being put into the pockets of criminals. Here is just one example of the sophisticated techniques that fraudsters are using. FFSearcher Google has a program called “AdSense for Search”, which adds a Google widget to a publisher's website. If a visitor to that website uses Google from it, and then clicks on a PPC advert, the website owner gains some money from the click. FFSearcher exploits this system, and is a rare example of click fraud in which the advertising network actually loses money rather than profiting from it. FFSearcher is a piece of malicious software called a trojan, which people download believing to be an innocent program. Once it has been downloaded, it takes over part of your computer in an insidious way. Your computer will seem unaffected in every way, but every time you search on Google, the search is made through a Google widget on a separate website. The address bar of your browser will not even show this – it will show up as a normal Google address. Any time that any infected user clicked on an advert in Google, it was registered as having come through a website called my-web-way.com, and that website would receive some of the money Google was paid. The reason this system was so hard to detect was that the behavior of the end users was exactly as normal. They would click through in the same way, and even buy from the advertising site at the same rate, but the offending website was being credited for all of the traffic. This is an example of a very sophisticated method. Criminals are using methods like this every day to defraud you out of as much money as they can. As an advertiser on PPC, you cannot be expected to root out this sort of behavior yourself – you specialize in different areas. You need to find tools that will solve these problems for you, and those tools are called ad trackers. The industry takes ad trackers very seriously, and all of the big players are using them. If you want to defend yourself against click fraud threats, you need to use an ad tracker which enables click fraud protection. |
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| AdWatcher | 9.3 |
| HitsLink | 6.4 |
| HyperTracker | 6.4 |
| WhosClickingWho | 6.4 |
| DynaTracker | 6.2 |
| ConversionRuler | 6.3 |
| AdTrackz | 5.9 |
| AdMinder | 5.1 |
| ROIWiz | 5 |
| ClickAlyzer | 1.6 |
| ProAnalyzer | 0 |
