Click Fraud: Don't Believe the Hype

Seriously, it's really blown out of proportion.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• clickfraud
• click
• fraud
• ppc
• search
• engine
• marketing
• advertising
• searchanyway
• affiliate

[hemistaka]

With each click costing me anywhere from 50 cents to as much as $3 dollars, you can imagine how quickly my advertising budget was diminished. It appeared that I was receiving hundreds and thousands of new visitors to my website - but no new customers? My product is strong, my landing pages were solid, I close most of my customers. Google has made billions by literally stealing from small businesses.

[hemistaka]

Going out on a limb and speculating is precisely what you have done, and speaking from VERY COSTLY EXPERIENCE, you couldn't have been more wrong. After weeks and months of tracking and monitoring visitors to my site, who were arriving as a result of Google Adsense, it was discovered that nearly 70% of those clicks were coming from a handful of the same "visitors" one right after another. I would literally have dozens of clicks from the same person in less than a minute. With each click costing

[LilChuckyWoodenHead]

I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE SAYING BUT THERE ARE SPOILERS WHO WILL CASUALLY DO ANYTHING TO HARM ANOTHER. PARTICUALLY IF WHAT YOU ARE SAYING DISAGREES OR CONFLICTS SOMEHOW WITH WHAT THEY BELIEVE IS IMPORTANT.

[MrValthor]

google happily rips off these poor suckers and takes their money with no practical avenue to get their money back...they should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantaqge of all the people that thought they new what they were doing shame on you google for doing this and for corrupting the entire internet never mind the people making little money...worry about the people who ended up with bills they can't pay ! my heart goes out to the adsense suckers that got ripped off by theses vultures...

[ShytKicka]

This guy is 100% on the money.

There is a big difference between invalid clicks and click fraud, which is a problem because the industry cannot understand this.

Click fraud makes up less than a percentage of all clicks. Invalid clicks are automatically filtered out by Google and Yahoo.

Don't believe companies like Clickforensics or other third-party auditing firms. They are strictly based on invalid clicks which is not fraud.

[lesliek1]

if he doesn't work for google, he has a few of his own made-for-ads sites and is profiting from arbitrage himself. oh, and it's UH-BOWT, not uh-boot.

[ATybjerg]

Prince - the content network is far more likely to give you these types of problems compared to search advertising, (see "click fraud: anecdotes from the front line" on the googlebusiness youtube channel). If you must use the content network I'd suggest moving to a CPA model, that way you'll only pay for actual results from the content network.

[nateh32]

this guy is a complete fucking idiot and he makes no sense whatsoever...i think he must work for google.

[Princebenidorm]

OK dude. So yesterday I received 35 clicks via a dodgy adsense website. Each visit was labelled as 0 seconds. So these do not count and Google wont charge me for?