Safeguards Search Engines Can and Can t Offer

Safeguards Search Engines Can and Can't Offer

The search engines realize that if your campaigns don't make money, you'll stop advertising. They're aware that your ROI takes a nose dive if you're paying for clicks from competitors who hit your listings a hundred times; therefore, additional clicks from these types of activities are not counted. Automated robot or spider activities aren't fraudulent, but are fortunately also considered invalid clicks for which advertisers don't pay.

In an effort to shield their advertisers from unfair profit loss, search engines have implemented click protection systems to remove fraudulent, or invalid, clicks from your accounts. Overture, a leader in sharing information with the public on click fraud, notes that each click is evaluated along 20 ‚ 50 different data points every day (http://www. overture .com/d/USm/ac/su/faq_as.jhtml). Sample data points evaluated include:

• IP address

• User session information

• User cookie information

• The network to which an IP belongs

• The user's browser information

• The search term requested by the user

• The time of the click

• The rank of the advertiser's listing

• The bid of the advertiser's listing

• The time of the search

• The time of the click

Google also reports how they actively monitor for click abuse or robot activity and remove these clicks from your reports and billing statements ( https ://adwords.google.com/select/faq/guidelines.html#3).

Even with search engines taking an active role policing click fraud, not all of it is caught. Because malicious clickers aren't addressed by search engines, this activity isn't deterred either.

Once upon a time, there was a CEO of a lead generation company whom I'll call Bob. Every day, Bob would click a portion of his Top 10 competitors' listings on PFP search engines. He'd click the listings once from his home, then from his office. And he'd click listings from his laptop while traveling. His strategy was simple: by clicking his competitors' keywords they eventually depleted their ad budgets and dropped out of the top positions for a short time until they added more money to their accounts. Bob, paying much less for a lower position, jumped into a Top 3 spot. He scored a premium position for a low amount. Because he randomly clicked select keywords from different locations, his competitors might have paid for a portion of his fraudulent behavior as well. Bad Bob. This story of Bob, the Evil Clicker, demonstrates why companies need to patrol their own campaigns. The search engines won't catch every fraudulent click from competitors who employ sneaky tactics. Besides, perpetrators' behavior needs to be deterred.