Click fraud still occurs in paid search, and at some level always will. However, the engines do a solid job at monitoring the problem. The issue for search marketers is to ensure the metrics don't go out of whack from a normal level of variance.
Over the past week I’ve been reading articles about how display is riddled with fraud and costing advertisers $6 million a month. From fake Twitter followers, to ghost publishers, this argument is going to persist for the web for a long time.
The argument of digital fraud in the advertising space is nothing new to search marketers.
Click fraud was once a very large problem in paid search. I remember a time when almost every RFP included questions about how our agency monitored click fraud. The number of times that question appears today in RFPs is down significantly, but with the resurgence of the argument I wanted to take a look into it again.
Google first introduced “invalid clicks” as a metric in 2006. This metric was intended to provide some insight into how much fraud was occurring and ease the minds of advertisers. Google identifies three areas they determine to be invalid clicks:
I looked at my agency’s clients to see what types of invalid clicks were coming through, and what areas they were coming from. The results were interesting:
Click fraud still occurs in paid search, and at some level always will. However, the engines at this point do a solid job at monitoring the problem. The issue for search marketers is to ensure the metrics don’t go out of whack from a normal level of variance.
Meanwhile the focus will be on emerging media types where fraud is ahead of the development curve. Heck even 53 percent of Justin Bieber’s Twitter followers are fake.