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.
