Trending Now

Click fraud: The inside story?

The click fraud news just won’t quit. Since I wrote my March Biznology newsletter, we’ve seen court cases against both the search engines and the alleged defrauders, but now there’s something new. Joe Holcomb, a Senior VP at BlowSearch, has written an entry in his personal blog that reveals some scary possibilities.


Joe is an insider in the paid placement industry, and as such his opinion carries more weight, but it is still just one voice. Nevertheless, his post may confirm some of the fears of search marketers that click fraud really is spiraling and may be as hard to stop as I speculated in my March newsletter.
Joe baldly states, as I believe, that click fraud from competitors is not nearly as big a problem as people think. Joe says that automated click fraud is a huge problem and that search engines don’t really want to dwell on that.
Joe further charges that search engines can’t stop click fraud and know that they can’t, and that they handle individual complaints from advertisers but don’t issue wholesale credits to others based on reports from a few. It is frankly not in their business interest to do so. He thinks that the estimates of 20% of all clicks being fraudulent may even be low!
Joe may be biased in his role with BlowSearch, but he disagrees with my assertion that the larger search engines do a better job of policing click fraud than smaller players—Joe claims that none of the vendors have a handle on this growing problem. He believes (and it has some logic to it) that clever defrauders may be able to hide their fraudulent clicks more easily in the larger traffic volumes of the most popular engines. But he does say that the smaller players, such as FindWhat and Kanoodle, that syndicate their traffic to other sites may be more susceptible to click fraud. (Blowsearch does not do as much of that, as you might expect.)
In addition to the vendors that I mentioned in the March Biznology newsletter, Joe also mentions three more vendors that can help monitor click fraud for advertisers (I haven’t looked at any of them): TrackingROI, Clicklab, and Alchemist Media.
Read Joe’s post for yourself—it is worth your time if you are concerned about click fraud.

Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a Converseon, an AI powered consumer intelligence technology and consulting firm. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a marketing automation software solutions and services firm. Mike also served as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO. Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world. Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with world-renowned author James Mathewson. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology® and writes regularly for other blogs. In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School. He was a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and is now a Senior Fellow of The Conference Board. A Certified Speaking Professional, Mike regularly makes speaking appearances. Mike’s previous appearances include keynote speaking appearances worldwide

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Discussion

  1. SSL Training

    Hello Sir! Fascinating post you have here. I agree with you about how much click fraud campaign has increased within a few years and many people get caught into this trap frequently. I hope online platforms such as Google will find a way to stop these scams to keep people safe from falling into the click fraud trap ever again. Please keep up with this kind of amazing content to keep people informed about modern world activities. By the way, I would highly recommend you to visit and explore SSL Training because this site can get a whole blog for itself as it covers most of the information regarding digital marketing as well as Graphic designing, web and app development for interested ones. This site will be best for people that would like to pursue their careers in the online world. So If you have any idea about this website or you ever used their services, then kindly share your experience with me here. I’m waiting here for your feedback regarding this web. Thanks for having me here.

  2. SSL Solutions

    Amazing post you have here. No lengthy paragraphs, straightforward explanations, and depth coverage of digital marketing with beneficial strategies and outcomes have been mentioned here in high quality within a single. I’m new in the field of digital marketing so I explored a lot of posts that were having content related to this field particularly and found your post very interesting and helpful. Please keep up with this kind of knowledgeable content to help people search for valuable posts containing high-quality content like yours. I don’t know if you know about this site or not but, I would highly recommend you to visit and explore this website:
    SSL Solutions
    The reason is that this site covers most of the information regarding “Digital Marketing” as well as graphic designing, web and app development for interested ones. This site will be best for people that would like to pursue their careers in the online world. So If you have any idea about this website or you ever used their services, then kindly share your experience with me here.

  3. farhan

    Good day! I visit your website and it reminds me that I have built my own site that matches the user’s expertise and it’ll help me to boost my confidence and generate traffic as well. Please visit my site and share your feedback, I may look forward to hearing from you.
    Thanks
    https://fetchlogos.com/asurascans/

Back to top