- Ad Age, Wednesday, March 1, 2006 10:15 AM
At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York yesterday, search marketing vendors unleashed a torrent of criticism at search providers Google and Yahoo over their inability to protect
advertisers from click fraud,
Ad Age reports. The most prevalent example of click fraud occurs when an advertiser sets up an automated system that repeatedly clicks on a competitor's sponsored
link to drive up the price they pay while drying out their monthly inventory. Another form of click fraud involves an advertiser setting up a fake Web site as a search engine network affiliate, and
then using an automated program to repeatedly click on their own ad, for which they receive revenue from Google as a publisher in its contextual network, AdSense. Search vendors claim click fraud
costs marketers $1 billion a year--roughly a fifth of what was spent on search last year, accounting for anywhere between 5 and 35 percent of clicks, depending on the advertising category. They say
Google and Yahoo severely underestimate the impact of fraudulent clicks, and warn marketers to closely scrutinize their click-through rates for signs of fraud. Meanwhile, Google and Yahoo say they
refund victims of click fraud in full, and have provided their advertisers with a system that lets them submit questionable activity for review. However, one search marketer pointed out the downward
trend in search companies' efforts to detect invalid clicks. He pointed out that Google even changed the wording of a notice to advertisers on its site last year from "we detect most invalid clicks"
to "our goal is to detect the most invalid clicks." A Google rep vigorously defended his company's efforts to control click fraud: "I hope everyone knows we take this very seriously," he said, later
adding an awkward analogy to TV spending: "People spend millions of dollars in TV advertising, but do they really know those people were sitting there watching that program?" I personally don't see
how stealing from competitors equates with consumers choosing not to watch TV commercials.
Read the whole story at Ad Age »