Google Fires Back: Publishes “Fictitious Clicks” Report on Third-Party Click Auditors

According to Google, the most fundamental flow they have found in the click-fraud reports is the existence of fictitious clicks. Fictitious clicks are defined as clicks that show up in the reports, but do not show up on Google’s logs as AdWords clicks.

The tone of the report seems a lot like my city manager’s letter that came out shortly after claims of possible criminal mishandlings of a $300M utilities expansion project were published in the 3rd of 3 audits thus far performed on the project; stern and saddened with a hint of spin. Perhaps this is the standard feel a rebuttal should have?

Below are the main bullet points from the findings:

• Fictitious clicks due to detection of page reloads as ad clicks.
This is the counting of page reloads on an advertiser’s site as multiple clicks on the advertiser’s AdWords ad - which did not actually occur. Page reloads can occur for various reasons, including:
o user browses more deeply into the advertiser’s site, then hits back button, causing a potential reload of the original landing page
o user presses browser reload button on the landing page
o user opens a new window in Internet Explorer, causing a reload of the landing page

• Fictitious clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks.
This is the counting of one advertiser’s traffic in another advertiser’s report, even if the advertisers span different ad networks.

These two problems are serious, and have resulted in significant inflation of click fraud estimates from each of the click fraud auditing firms we examined. Appendix A provides simple sequences of events which illustrate these problems occurring in practice.

Additional observations:

• Events identified as fraudulent in these reports, which actually match real clicks in our logs, often converted at nearly the same rate (and in some cases better) compared to other clicks. For example, in one case where 800 paid clicks were marked as .fraudulent., the rate of conversion for these clicks was 5.1%, which compared favorably with the 5.8% overall conversion rate the advertiser achieved on approximately 24000 paid clicks.
• The use of sample-based analysis or the failure to provide the total number of events analyzed (whether they were fraudulent or not) denies advertisers the ability to do even the most basic cross-checking, for example by comparing to the total number of clicks reported by Google. Such a basic test would have alerted them to the presence of fictitious clicks. The fact that third-parties have also not taken measures to do this type of checking raises some serious questions.
• Aside from the above issues, we have also seen basic engineering errors in some of these reports (covered in Appendix B).

Appendix B presents detailed case studies for three firms: ClickFacts, Click Forensics, and AdWatcher. Click fraud estimates from ClickFacts and Click Forensics have received widespread media coverage. And among third-party auditing reports submitted to us by advertisers, reports from AdWatcher are the most common.

All three cases studies exhibit the problem of severe click inflation in their reports primarily due to the presence of fictitious clicks, which generally render their published estimates on click fraud invalid.

The report then goes on to explain what Google’s next steps are, what the third-party auditing firms need to do, what advertisers can do and shows problem examples in the appendix.

Google takes a very strong stance in the report saying:

“We do believe that there is a place for third-party click auditing firs in the industry’s value chain, but only for those who can deliver real value to all stakeholders. In fact we would value having true vulnerabilities in our invalid click detection systems pointed out to us. However, to date, we have not yet discovered a single legitimate vulnerability as the result of a third-party click fraud auditing report.”

It seems as though there is room for third-party click auditing firms. And clearly some of these firms either do not have the funds needed to perform such R&D or do not wish to and want to rely on marketing scare tactics to generate revenue. As I mentioned in my previous article Click-Fraud, Click Thugs and Deep Pockets, there is need for a consortium and for the click auditing firms to band together to increase their legitimacy by acting as one. And to do this with the purpose of developing best practices, standards of conduct and technology in order to help advertisers. Or perhaps there is no need for them after all and this is really why they have neglected their fledgling industry; click auditors you tell us?

The report is available online here

This is John Brock for Pay Per Click Analyst

www.payperclickanalys.com

www.onlinemarketinganalyst.com