| LED Digest 2232: The Click Fraud Problem |
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An interesting analysis by David Yancey on the click fraud fiasco that is
currently shaking the advertising industry. How serious is it? Find out...
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========== NEW ===================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 24, 2006 Issue no. 2232 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> --== The Click Fraud Problem ==-- ~ David Yancey "We can confirm that clickfraud is a very serious and costly problem..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== HTML Editor Recommendations ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "...I prefer designing directly on the screen using a graphical web editor." ~ Bruce Garrett "Like others, I find myself hand-coding to clean up the code." ~ Steve Pronger "Small business owners are generally not interested in becoming programmers..." ~ Mark Whitman "Forget the nonsense about search engines not liking tables." --== Rectifying DMOZ Listings ==-- ~ Simon Grabowski "They say it takes 2 weeks, but it may take much longer..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== .htaccess and Rewrite ==-- ~ John Smart <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, The following post on click fraud by veteran LED member David Yancey appeared recently in Online Ads (http://www.o-a.com). I asked David to re-post it here. Due to its length, I'm publishing it in 2 parts. The second and final installment will be in tomorrow's issue. I'd love to hear your thoughts on David's points and approach, and on the click fraud problem in general. Thanks, Adam ---------------------- From: David Yancey Subject: The Click Fraud Problem - Part I We recently completed the Beta test for a new e-commerce site. Over a five month period, we gained first-hand experience with clickfraud coming from Google's Adwords program and several other PPC services. We can confirm that clickfraud is a very serious and costly problem for at least a percentage of e-commerce sites in sectors where competitive pressure is intense. I won't belabor the list readers with the months of painstakingly detailed analysis we did. But I will share the highlights and conclusions, in the hope that our nasty experience helps others use PPC and similar paid search services more cost-effectively. First, look at incidental, "web overhead" clicks -- Cliff [Kurtzman's] analysis showing bot-triggered and other incidental useless "visitors" is informative [see http://www.o-a.com/archives-frame3.html and click the "read messages" button for the original post], but these sorts of clicks constitute what I call "click noise" -- "traffic" that we simply have to be smart enough to ignore, especially when quoting pages viewed to advertisers. Further, as Cliff says, this kind of "traffic" can be expected to grow, as more spidering-type tools are introduced. We focused not on this "click noise", but on true "click fraud" -- since the site used for our test is new, and has the potential to grow (as a business) rapidly, we wanted to understand quickly if it was going to be susceptible to click fraud. We therefore sent all PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages, one for each ad class. Ad class is our way of grouping text ads by ultimate target audience micro-segments. It's more involved than simply grouping the PPC ads according to keywords, and somewhat complex to explain, but it's a simple concept intuitively: if, of, say, 20 ads for the site running at any one time, 3 are aimed at folks who like widgets that *they* think will appeal to certain *other* people, then those three ads make a "class". "Ad classes" extend behavioral targeting theory a bit, by aggregating ads by (hopefully) truer target criteria, to simplify the analysis and planning and administration of aggressive, large, PPC campaigns. Anyway, the point is that we were very rigorous in tracking traffic against PPC source, using specific pages for each ad class within each paid source. We were thus able to measure not only the number of clicks, frequencies, and time-of-day, but the *comparative* visitor behavior and ultimate conversion rates for each such clickthrough. This means, for example, that we can see how alleged visitors coming from Google "behave" as compared to those from other sites, for the *same ad, at the same time of day*. We also tried to be rigorous in terms of defining fraudulent clicks as opposed to incidentally (ie, unintentionally) recurring clicks. Differentiating among these is problematic, and I don't propose to detail here how we approached it. There are many solid discussions of this analytical problem available online for those who wish to learn more. Suffice to say that we are 95% confident we can deduce if multiple clicks from a given IP address are truly "fraudulent" or not. For competitive reasons, I will not say here how many clicks we measured over the Beta test, only that it was in the many thousands. I should also add that we quickly eliminated AdSense ads from our test campaign, feeling that these are much too fragmented (in our specific categories) to allow qualified measurement. Collectively, the Beta test showed that at least 30% of the Google clickthroughs were fraudulent. I say "at least", because I am sure the fraudsters are several steps ahead of us (and Google, too) in disguising the fraudulent clicks. We are also very confident that if we had allowed AdSense ads to stay in the test population, *and* if we could be sure how to differentiate the bad AdSense apples from the good ones, the overall fraud number might reach 50% or even higher (in our case). Why is the fraud count so "high" in this test? Well, the fact is that we don't really know if it *is* all that high. Most people who claim that click fraud is not such a big deal have no actual statistically valid evidence to back their claim, in our experience. And those who say that Google is on top of this situation are perhaps naive, technically. Give me a large enough network of zombies, a spider-generated list of sites displaying selected AdSense ads, some targeting keywords, and one solid scriptwriter, and I will produce many thousands of clicks from many thousands of IP addresses in a few days. These will seem to come from all over the map, but of course I would weight them so that most will seem to be US in origin. I'll also time the flow to match the proper day-part in the US market. And then I will switch the whole operation to a different zombie network every few hours. I'll further slice and rotate my hired zombies across all the different PPC sites where the targeted ads appear, knowing that it is certain Google and Yahoo and MSN will never compare their raw clickthrough data. Believe me, folks, tracking *all* the clickfraud is *way* harder than you probably think. David Yancey Managing Partner -- 22Graphic -- http://www.tootoographic.com CEO -- Adjunction LLC -- http://www.vivante.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Shaun Johnston Subject: HTML editors I hand code when I need to, but I prefer designing directly on the screen using a graphical web editor. I use Namo WebEditor, which costs around $80 -- see www.namo.com. It has most of the features of Dreamweaver but in a simpler interface. Good manual. It has some easy-to-get around quirks, but generally is very simple and easy to use. We no longer use Contribute, we just get our clients to buy a copy of WebEditor and show them how to stay out of trouble. Works fine. I don't think you could do that with DreamWeaver. Shaun Johnston shaun, nycgetaways.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Bruce Garrett Subject: HTML editors > I'd imagine that most people who tag by hand > would disagree with that process being > "incredibly laborious and time-consuming". - M. Whitman, LED 2231 I'm one of those folks who uses Front Page, not because I like it but because my clients want the ability to make changes to their websites and are comfortable with Front Page. My dislike stems from all of the extraneous code Front Page inserts. Like others, I find myself hand-coding to clean up the code. It is not hard and it does take a little more time but I feel it is worth it. I also subject my code to the W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/. The validator works well with the exception of some java script. Does hand-coding and W3C make a difference for search engines, load times, etc.? I'm not sure but I personally derive a sense of satisfaction when my code "passes." Bruce Garrett www.archive-cd.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: HTML editors If we go back to the start of this thread Richard Majewski asked [issue 2228] for advice on an alternative to Dreamweaver because he was having trouble mastering it and desired something easier to use. I think it's a pretty safe bet that learning HTML and hand-coding his site is not what he had in mind. Richard is typical of most small business operators. They have a business to run. A website is just one method of driving customers to their business. Small business owners are generally not interested in becoming programmers or web designers. Sure, some are more IT savvy and will take the time to learn new skills. Most won't. They are more concerned about whether their website is contributing to the bottom line of their business results, rather than the tools used to create it. Web designers tend to forget that what's important to them isn't necessarily important to small business owners. You might think that "stripping out code" is a priority. Small business owners are more concerned with generating a profit. Richard, I think someone recommended XSitePro. I'd recommend you give it a try as well. It's nowhere near as flexible as Dreamweaver but is much easier to learn. DW is a great program. For sure, it will produce cleaner code and make faster loading pages. The split screen will allow you to learn HTML basics as you design. But XSitePro focuses on marketing, SEO and monetization rather than Web technologies. Here's a site I built with XSitePro: http://www.hazelbrookhawks.com/ This was a site I did for my daughter's soccer team. It may not be the cutting edge in design but it only took a few hours to put together. Being a freebie, that was important. It gets the job done and the club are quite happy with it. It's also generating much needed income for the club with the AdSense ads. XSitePro has easy integration of AdSense and affiliate programs. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: HTML editors > We use Note Tab Pro not only to create sites now, but we use it > because it is one of the most powerful software programs available. - Rod Aries LED, 2231 I second that - if you want to code by hand Note Tab Pro is the way to go. Been using it for many years, wouldn't consider anything else - highly recommended. > There is a place for hand coding, unfortunately it > seems that often time that place is inflating egos. - John Smart, LED 2231 A few others... any time you want a high precision site that fits together tightly like a puzzle, any time you want full control over how your site looks, any time you do any type of coding (HTML is not coding), any time you want a high end site, any time you get asked by someone who uses an HTML editor to help get something to layout properly because their editor won't do it, any time you want to progress beyond template hack... > A lot of scripts (php, asp, etc) create tables > based on the data they get from a database. PHP does not create tables, HTML does, and its power goes *far* beyond linking to databases. I don't use ASP so I can't speak for that but I assume the same applies. > Also, if you nest multiple tables, being able to hand code > can really help if you manage to confuse Dream Weaver, > that said, you really shouldn't be nesting multiple tables! I know CSS inside out but still find many occasions when using tables and even nested tables is much easier than CSS for precision layout. Forget the nonsense about search engines not liking tables. If you know how SE spiders read a page (which requires understanding HTML) and understand even basic SEO techniques, you won't be penalized for using tables. To me, the best use for editors is to help people learn HTML so they can break away from the restrictions and frustrations of editors. Isn't this about the billionth time this thread has come up? :) M. Whitman -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Simon K. Grabowski Subject: Rectifying DMOZ Listings > My site is listed in DMOZ in a different title > than the actual title. I have noticed that same > title is in Google and MSN search results. - Baruch Avraham, LED 2230 Baruch, While minor impact cannot be ruled out, it is unlikely that the title / description of your DMOZ listing had a decisive influence over your Google and MSN rankings. You can try to update your ranking with DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/help/update.html They say it takes 2 weeks, but it may take much longer unless you use the tips found at http://www.corruptdmozeditor.com/ (sorry, couldn't resist ;) Fortunately there's something you can do yourself without having to wait for DMOZ editors to act upon your changes. Simply add the following HTML to between the < HEAD > and < /HEAD > tags of your website: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> This tells Google and MSN not to use the DMOZ listing when showing results. Yahoo currently doesn't support this. Please note that it may take several weeks before Google and MSN re-index your website and learn about this change. Hope this helps. Simon Grabowski http://www.getresponse.com GetResponse email marketing ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John Smart Subject: htaccess > I really appreciate... the Google employee post by Brian White > [issue 2227] "including a modified .htaccess using rewrite rules". - Cheryl Berry, LED 2231 Rewrite is a cool toy. I use it at internetdesign.com - the whole site is completely dynamic, none of those pages really exist! They are all database calls. Here is how I did it: htaccess file: RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ([^.]+).[h|H][t|T][mM][lL]$ show.php?id=$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php] The rewrite rule, removes the htm or html extention (so if you go to index.htm or index.html you get the page not a 404) it then sends the query to my shopw.php script with a GET call of: /show.php?id=index (if they are looking for the index.html page) .. show.php then takes care of calling the relevant data - or making a 404 if there is no data. Rewrite can do so much more, based on refferer you can send things to different locations - used a lot for Google image searches. Following the same chain of thought it would be possible to do all sorts of things, from having a different site for Google and for humans, or for searching for DSL or other reference to highspeed connection on the identifier, and showing a much more multimedia rich site to those flying at high speed. It is best to play with this on a domain that is not live - when you mess up your .htaccess, and trust me, you will! Any attempt to view your site is greated with a server misconfiguration error (which is plain ugly!) Rewrite engine on gets things going, Rewrite Base sets the base path for this to affect - I have it set as / because I want to rewrite everything from the root up. I realize this is a very brief over view, I hope it helps. John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World
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