I’ve just seen a new type of click fraud on one of my accounts, and thought it may serve as a warning to anyone out there using the Content Network.
The performance of the Content Network went haywire a few days ago. This isn’t that unusual, as people who use the Content Network will testify. A big website suddenly has a page about your product or service, and your figures can go all over the place.
But as I always do, I looked into it, to see if any action was needed. Indeed, as expected, the spike in traffic was all coming from one website. But it wasn’t a newspaper website or indeed any well-known site. It was a website that I’d never heard of.
I ran a placement report, and discovered that prior to 4 days ago, I’d never had a click from this website. In the last four days, they’d burned through £700 of my client’s money, without a single conversion to show for it.
Remarkably, the clickthrough rate from this website was a staggering 6%, a figure almost unheard of on the Content Network.
I decided to visit this website, and I wasn’t all that impressed. There was one page of text, stuffed with keywords about a single service. There were no less than 10 adverts on this page, along with some ‘learn more’ links that all went through to a free prize draw website.
They had a ‘Contact Us’ page with no contact details, a form, and another 12 adverts, and the Terms and Conditions page (a strange thing to have, since they offered no products or services) was similarly wallpapered with adverts.
So far, they hadn’t really broken any rules or laws, but where were all these clicks coming from? They had no natural or paid search results – even for their own name. And why was the clickthrough rate so high?
It all points towards them clicking on their own adverts, and pocketing the cash. The website in question was about student loans, so it’s likely that they would have no problems at all using different IP addresses, bypassing Google’s detection.
I have of course passed it on to Google’s click fraud team to investigate, and I’m sure they’ll be shut down soon. But there’s nothing to stop anyone else pulling a trick like this – and unless you check your placement reports when strange things happen on the Content Network, you could easily become a victim.
It’s likely that Google will reimburse my client, but will they reimburse every other advertiser on this website? I have no idea, but I would say that to be on the safe side, you definitely want to be the one that catches this, rather than relying on somebody else to spot it.
Oh man the content network seems like a black hole for money. As an adwords user there is no way I will participate in content ads. But as an adsense advertiser…..I rely on this type. But is my feeling that the content network has always been a real source for click fraud.
When I worked for a medium sized company with a 1k daily spend….we had a 3rd party click fraud monitoring tool that helped produce reports. These reports would get us back a small percentage on money that Google “missed” in terms of click fraud.
Now Im at a huge company with 100k spend and they have no such systems in place to identify fraud. They just rely on Google and other SEM partners to mange. Which I believe is a huge mistake.
Anyways my point is, that is seems so simple to GAME the system….and Im sure people are making some nice money off this method. MAybe its just easier to be a crook than to work hard for your piece of the pie these days.