Prior to the advent of Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter, it would have been hard to believe that someone could cost your business thousands of dollars merely by clicking
a link over and over. Now click fraud is a problem of great concern for companies advertising with keyword buys, and analytics firms are scrambling to release products to help track and combat bogus
clicks.
ClickTracks is one of the first full-service analytics packages on the market that includes an anti-click fraud tool. ClickTracks included a fraud detection feature in the recent
release of its version 6.1 tool.
Michael Stebbins, vice president of marketing for ClickTracks, says the feature works by analyzing all of a user’s keyword campaigns and then
looking for unusual patterns in referral sources, visitor Internet Protocols, conversion rates, and length of visits.
Some users of the early beta version of the tool were able to secure
large refunds from pay-per-click providers. One customer, Diamond Harmony LLC, an online diamond retailer, managed to receive a refund of nearly $10,000 from one of its pay-per-click providers.
“The conversions for certain engines that we were using weren’t matching up with the orders that we were tracking on our side,” says Joe Tedd, manager of search strategies for
Diamond Harmony. “We went back to the engine in question and said, ‘Here’s the data you’re reporting to us from your engine, here’s the data we’re getting —
why is there such a discrepancy?’”