Is Click Fraud a big problem?
I recently explained to a small business owner how pay per click campaigns work. His first comment was that he would be too worried about one of his competitors clicking on his ads. He’s having problems at the moment with a competitor tying up his fax machine on a daily basis.
There was a good thread in the High Rankings forum this week about click fraud. It came about after this report that Google claims the figures for invalid clicks are about 2% overall.
Google filters out and doesn’t charge for invalid clicks. This is when someone clicks more than once on the same ad within a time period. Of course this isn’t necessarily fraudulent. It can be part of normal search behaviour to revisit links. Truly fraudulent click behaviour can go undetected as it’s outside of their current filters. There were some understandable objections that the 2% figure doesn’t address this at all.
Really though, for the vast majority of accounts there’s going to be hardly any click fraud. That’s not to say that everyone clicking has a definite intent to purchase but that’s no different from any other advertising.
You pay in order to reach as many as possible in your target market. Some of those will be interested and some will buy. If you pay for a TV commercial a percentage of people will fast forward through the commercials. Same with newspaper inserts. The newspapers publish the circulation figures but a proportion will never look at the ads.
The biggest problem with click fraud is the fear factor that it seems to generate in some people. It would be better if it never happened at all but the risks are far greater that a campaign might be set up and managed badly. There’s more to lose by having a badly structured account, the wrong keywords or poor bid management than there is by the threat of click fraud.
Posted in Google AdWords Basics
December 19th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
“You pay in order to reach as many as possible in your target market.”
In traditional media, ad price is generally a factor of (estimated) target market size. OTOH, with CPC advertising, you pay for clicks which do not correlate to estimated market size. (What you pay per click may correlate more strongly.) Click fraud makes this worse as advertisers have very little insight as to who (or what) is clicking.
“There’s more to lose by having a badly structured account, the wrong keywords or poor bid management than there is by the threat of click fraud.”
Maybe. There’s no way to measure this as the intent of every click can’t be determined.
December 19th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Hi Greg, Thanks for the comments. I had a look through your journal and some interesting stuff and links regarding click fraud.
May 19th, 2007 at 4:11 am
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