The obvious risk of pay per click
How does one protect one's self against the obvious risk relating to the pay per click internet advertising model. How does one guard against malicious clicks on your ad such that your daily quota is not used up before any real viable clients had a chance to see your add.
No responses???
So does this mean that one is really only sold the illusion of advertising as your ad may easily be nullified by the process mentioned above?
So does this mean that one is really only sold the illusion of advertising as your ad may easily be nullified by the process mentioned above?
Do you have any proof that these malicious clicks actually happen? If you're talking about people being paid to click on adds that they aren't interested in, so that the website hosting the add gets money, that's illegal under the terms of adsense.
| Do you have any proof that these malicious clicks actually happen? |
Whether I have proof or not is of no consequence to my question. I am claiming that the opportunity exists for someone to do this as the model allows it. So why leave a big hole in the ground and hope no one falls into it.
How does adsense convict an individual or organisation guilty of this. How will they track down who clicked maliciously on your add when done from a internet cafe and worse the person who does it pretends that he genuinely did not do it on purpose ...
Seems like it would be much better to have just closed the hole in the first place.
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| How does adsense convict an individual or organisation guilty of this. |
What do you think the chances are that 10K unique individuals clicked on the same ad all from the same IP address and each visitor stayed on the linked site for < 10 seconds? There is a certain amount of heuristic analysis and data gathering involved but generally click fraud is pretty obvious.
In order for a scam like that to be viable they need to deal in quantity of clicks, if each click takes X amount of time for each page to load or whatever then they have an upper limit on the amount of money that they can generate per node. The obvious answer is to add more nodes but this quickly becomes noticeable to anyone watching.
Then there is the content of the site to consider. Advertising professionals, like they have at Ad-Sense, have a pretty good idea of how many people they expect to be interested in pictures of paper-clips. So when that site suddenly gets 10 million hits in an hour, then they start to get suspicious.
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| The obvious answer is to add more nodes but this quickly becomes noticeable to anyone watching. |
Please explain how this is very noticeable - if done from a large enough network of nodes available to group then it could easily look like legitimate traffic.
| There is a certain amount of heuristic analysis and data gathering involved but generally click fraud is pretty obvious. |
This offers some protection but does not guarantee it. ie the potential still exists for you to be defrauded. This potential does not exist in true fixed rate advertising, ie you paid for your ad to be seen for a certain amount of time and no competitor can circumvent that and harm your ability to do business.
It becomes obvious when you consider everything else. IE the content of the site not being something that this many people will become interested in quickly, or that the traffic is increasing at a given rate and remaining constant, or that the visitors don't stay more then a few seconds, etc. There is no "magic bullet" here, you have to view it as a whole.
There is no guaranteed way that will prevent you from being defrauded in this manner. In fact you should plan on it. The only thing you can do is to take steps to mitigate the inevitable damage and chalk it up to being the digital equivalent of 'breakage' or 'spoilage' if you prefer.
The other thing you can do is not use this business model. IMHO it's kind of stupid to begin with. Some jerk took the pricing model from coupons, which was never that great to begin with, and tried to apply it to a digital context. Find another way to advertise your content.
There is no guaranteed way that will prevent you from being defrauded in this manner. In fact you should plan on it. The only thing you can do is to take steps to mitigate the inevitable damage and chalk it up to being the digital equivalent of 'breakage' or 'spoilage' if you prefer.
The other thing you can do is not use this business model. IMHO it's kind of stupid to begin with. Some jerk took the pricing model from coupons, which was never that great to begin with, and tried to apply it to a digital context. Find another way to advertise your content.
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