July 26, 2006
FAA Safety Instructions For The Google Jet
Inside Google spotted a funny write up named Google founders eager to take users for a ride. I'll quote the piece Inside Google quoted;
I’m now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be: In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, stock options will drop from the ceiling above you. Please inflate the options until you feel financially secure.
In the event of a sudden loss of propulsion, look under your seat for the blue, red, yellow and green Google parachute. Place the straps around your shoulders, tighten the waist belt, jump out of the aircraft and press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on your chest.
Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs
Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars.
Online Ad Spend 9% Of All Ad Spend By 2011
ClickZ reports on a JupiterResearch report that online advertising spend is projected to snag up nine-percent of the total advertising pie by 2011. They estimate that $25.9 billion in revenues will be spent on online ads by 2011, "rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent over the next five years." For search marketers, of that 9-percent of the pie, 43-percent of the online ad spend will be search base ads accounting for $11.1 billion, by 2011.
Google AdWords Now Reporting Invalid Click Rates
Google is now offering AdWords advertisers the ability to see how many
invalid clicks that Google catches before they are billed. "Estimating
invalid clicks" from the Official Google Blog has more about this good move,
which should help to better educate advertisers.
Concern about click fraud has been rising over the years, though whether
click fraud itself has risen remains a debatable point. In my
The Abridged
Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices post
yesterday, I highlighted one example of this -- of how Google is conducting more
investigations into click fraud reports but not paying out more. The independent
expert who compiled the report felt this was due to people having more concerns
rather than more click fraud occurring.
Still, that same report highlighted what many search marketers already know.
It's difficult to know what exactly is going on within the black box of Google's
ads billing system. The reporting Google is doing will help shed a bit more
light into that box.
Specifically, there are new reporting options to see "Invalid Clicks" and
"Invalid Clicks Rate." Check these, and you'll see all the clicks that Google
has filtered before you were billed, plus the percentage of those clicks versus
the total clicks to your campaign. More help from Google is covered
here.
It will be especially interesting to see what stats individual advertisers
start to share publicly. Going back to that independent report I mentioned, it
covered how Google catches far more invalid clicks through its filters compared
to those found when investigations are done after billing. Some advertisers
might find they have double-digit invalid click rates. That's not a reason to
panic, in the sense that you aren't paying for those clicks. You should be
reassured.
Then again, I suspect anyone seeing high levels of invalid clicks being
caught might also want to take a harder look at what they are actually getting
billed for beyond this, since the high rate might suggest they are in a
click-fraud prone industry and perhaps stuff is still slipping past the Google
filters. Of course, a low rate might warrant a further look since perhaps
Google's not catching stuff it should.
Confused? Here's the overriding advice. Everyone should be auditing their
click logs, watching for odd things, just as you would your credit card
statement. Google and Yahoo both have long had systems in place to automatically
catch fraud. The Google move significantly helps advertisers understand that
this protection is already in place. But it doesn't relieve the advertiser of
being prudent and doing their own review, as well.
Finally, isn't giving this data making it easier for those who want to
conduct click fraud to test what can get through? What prevents someone from
opening an account, then trying various things until they find a way to generate
clicks that Google can't catch?
"If you want to invest a huge amount of
time and resources, you could already run those type of experiments. It doesn't
provide significantly more feedback to fraudsters," said Shuman Ghosemajumder,
Google's business product manager for trust and safety.
By the way, though the reports are said to be "real-time," they actually give
you a total for an entire day. You can't see minute-by-minute catches.
July 25, 2006
AOL Redesigns Local CityGuides
Thanks to Gary Price for pointing out that AOL has launched a beta redesign of its popular CityGuides. Here's the current version of the site for New York and here's the new beta version of the same city site. Of the more than 300 CityGuides AOL offers, the top 25 are part of the new beta.
Among the upgrades and improvements are a visually richer interface, more imagery, more dynamically generated content and more community features. Gary also points out that AOL's Moviefone and CityGuides have also been added to the AOL mobile application.
Posted by Greg Sterling on Jul. 25, 2006 |
Permalink
Search Headlines & Links: July 25, 2006
Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along
with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:
From The SEW Blog...
- Daily
SearchCast, July 25, 2006: Report Says Google's Click Fraud Practices
"Reasonable;" Few Opposed Proposed Google Click Fraud Settlement; Tracking
Packages Via Search; Getting Real-Time Traffic Info & More!
Today's search podcast covers an independent report finding Google's click
fraud practices to be "reasonable," few object to Google's proposed click
fraud settlement; Google's "wow" versus Yahoo's "consistency" in terms of
product development; tracking packages via search engines; getting live
traffic reports via maps and more!
- The
Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection
Practices
Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was
published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit
over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed
public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It
finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though
there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation
was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know
whether some clicks are invalid -- and...
- Detailed
Look into the Google AdWords Landing Page Algo
The Google AdWords landing page algo changes this month have resulted in many
advertisers sitting up and thinking about quality issues beyond their ad copy,
and looking more closely at their landing pages. I caught up with Google to
get specifics on how the algo works, including just how they decided what made
a good landing page versus what didn't when they created their algo. I also
have ten best practices for advertisers needing to improve landing page
quality. The full length SEW subscribers article is here. A shorter (but
free!) version is here. Want to share your own best...
-
Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile
Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic
information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for
those who are walking, in addition to driving....
- Yahoo
Invests In Social Search Research
Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, as vice president and
Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respect database expert who
has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search."
Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo
has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search;
Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo
Groups and so on....
-
Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade
Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video
entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from
librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google
limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that
there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians
from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added
in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global
experiences). However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search
engine (other than Ask who...
- Yahoo &
Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings"
News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security
offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online
security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email
focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet.
So stay tuned....
-
SuperPages Buys Inceptor
As reported in ClickZ today, SuperPages, which is itself up for sale, has
acquired SEM firm Inceptor for an undisclosed amount. Verizon has been the
most forward thinking and acting of the yellow pages publishers when it comes
to offering performance-based products and leveraging search. This acquisition
gives SuperPages more range in what it can offer and how the company can
implement it -- and brings that cost in house. For more on this deal see my
blog post....
- Daily
SearchCast, July 21, 2006: Google's Great Second Quarter Results; MSN Revenue
Down; RSS Feeds For Ask Smart Answers And Google Base Results & More!
Friday's search podcast covers Google's great second quarter results; MSN's
revenues decline; Windows Live Local deserving a second look; RSS feeds for
Ask Smart Answers and Google Base results and more!
Headlines & News From Elsewhere
- Do you know the
way to SES San Jose 2006?, Matt Cutts
- Let's Get this San
Jose Party Started, SEOmoz
-
SES San Jose '06 Party Thread, Search Engine Roundtable
- Digg
Labs Launched, Google Blogoscoped
- Yahoo
Local UK, Germany Launched, Google Blogoscoped
-
Treffiletti Returns To Agency World, Eschews Big Shop For Digital Boutique,
MediaPost
-
Carat Expands Search Team, MediaPost
-
Microsoft adCenter Daily Stats Back To Normal, Search Engine Roundtable
- londonseo.org - Party time
again, Threadwatch
- New Google service for
developers, Googling Google
-
Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search, Part 2, Read/WriteWeb
- Google
Financial Data Visualized, Google Blogoscoped
-
Forecast: Online to
Reach 9 Percent Share of Ad Spend in 2011, ClickZ
-
Marchex Launches Local Ad Network On Open List, MediaPost
- Top 100 Digg Users
Control 56% of Digg's HomePage Content, SEOmoz
- How
Many Google Talkrs Really?, GigaOM
-
Instant Messaging and Trashing Google, TechCrunch
- Why Is
Stormfront.org Missing in Google Germany?, Google Blogoscoped
-
Domain Name Kiting: spammers exploiting domain reg, Boing Boing
- Missy's
Blogathon, Google Blogoscoped
-
International search landscape, Niall Kennedy
- Where's
Nathan Weinberg?, Google Blogoscoped
-
Smart site owners are getting huge traffic from Netscape--they are also
becoming the top users, Jason Calacanis
-
Online Dating 2.0: Thirteen Sites To Find Love, TechCrunch
- Fair Use,
Fair Game, Traffick
- Business.com's "No Follow"
Policy Revision, Threadwatch
- Where's The Mother
of all Links, Eric Ward
Daily SearchCast, July 25, 2006: Report Says Google's Click Fraud Practices "Reasonable;" Few Opposed Proposed Google Click Fraud Settlement; Tracking Packages Via Search; Getting Real-Time Traffic Info & More!
Today's search podcast covers an independent report finding Google's click
fraud practices to be "reasonable," few object to Google's proposed click fraud
settlement; Google's "wow" versus Yahoo's "consistency" in terms of product
development; tracking packages via search engines; getting live traffic reports
via maps and more!
Tune-in by listening to this
MP3
file, listening via WebmasterRadio
at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our
Odeo channel or through
iTunes via this
link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained
here) or
though our Yahoo Podcasts
channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the
Daily
SearchCast FAQ.
Below are links to items discussed:
- Judge
Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement
Associate Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge
will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google
settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before
finalizing that settlement....
-
Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable"
The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud
detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click
fraud. The report was part of an agreement of the Lane's Gifts v. Google
settlement and was performed by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of
Information Systems at NYU. Obviously Google is pretty happy about this report
and I didn't have time to go through the full 47 page report, but if you have
time, I bet you as Search Engine Marketer can learn a ton about the AdWords
system. Possibly, Danny will dig into this deeper next...
- The
Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection
Practices
Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was
published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit
over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed
public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It
finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though
there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation
was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know
whether some clicks are invalid -- and...
- GoDaddy
Launches Private Label Domain Park Program
GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked
at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters to sign up for a paid monthly
subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the
profits made from all clicks on the parked domain....
- Google
Versus Yahoo: Consistency Or Wow In Product Development?
An article over at the New York Times 'In the race with Google, it's
consistency vs 'wow'' discusses the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo
to the introduction of new technology and resources. The fact that Google
hasn't added some of the basics to its mapping service in comparison to the
Yahoo and AOL offerings is the starting point for an indepth discussion on how
both engines (MSN, AOL and Ask get very short shrift) are trying to increase
their user base....
- Yahoo
Invests In Social Search Research
Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, as vice president and
Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respect database expert who
has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search."
Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo
has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search;
Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo
Groups and so on....
- Yahoo &
Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings"
News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security
offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online
security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email
focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet.
So stay tuned....
-
Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade
Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video
entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from
librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google
limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that
there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians
from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added
in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global
experiences). However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search
engine (other than Ask who...
- SEOMoz
Spills The Beans On Pricing An SEO Campaign
Rand posted a blog entry named How to Price an SEO Campaign. He actually broke
down his pricing methodology for everyone to see. I have personally never seen
this done to this extent before in this industry. SEOs and SEMs can learn a
lot about how to price their campaigns and proposals by Rand's post. Rand
breaks down a consulting contract versus an implementation contact. His post
is very detailed and can give many SEMs an idea on how to improve their
contracts. Check out Rand's post here....
- Google
Test Expandable "More" Link
Philipp Lenssen reports Google is testing an expandable box that opens with
options, when you click on the "more" link from the Google.com home page. The
more link currently takes people to the more google products page, but this
link, is a little DHTML popup that has links to these products directly on the
page. The pop up cannot possibly have all of the products listed, so they have
a link to "even more" products that probably links to the page. A screen shot
is at Philipp's site....
-
Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature
No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results
to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With
Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and
then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product
Details. As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users
can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an
extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin
Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs....
- Tracking
Packages Via MSN Search
The MSN Search weblog has now announced that it is possible to use the system
for tracking packages, or more specifically, packages from FedEx, DHL, UPS and
USPS. Searchers can simply enter a tracking ID and some other tracking
keywords and the Package Tracking Instant Answer will correctly construct the
link. An example given is 'Where is UPS tracking number?' Additionally you
could use the RSS feed for the search to really keep up to date on where your
package has gone. Google has had this feature for years now, although it
doesn't have an option for DHL. Postscript from...
-
Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile
Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic
information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for
those who are walking, in addition to driving....
- Real-Time Traffic Via My
MSN Direct Spot Watch
The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices
Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was
published as part of the ongoing
Lane's Gifts v.
Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the
most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud
that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have
been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author
only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's
impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and thus,
potentially -- impossible to prevent some types of fraud through purely
automated means.
The report is long, a 47 page PDF file. Anyone interested in click fraud
issues should give it a thorough read. But given how everyone's always busy, I
thought I'd highlight below a number of sections that stood out in my review of
the document.
The report is by Dr.
Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University.
To prepare it, he says in the Executive Summary at the beginning (page 1):
I have been asked to evaluate Googles invalid click detection efforts and to
conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this
evaluation, I have visited Googles campus three times, examined various
internal documents, interviewed several Googles employees, have seen different
demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports
and charts showing various aspects of performance of Googles invalid click
detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information
narrated to me by Googles employees, I conclude that Googles efforts to combat
click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this
point.
Immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is that he makes no mention
of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if
he's only talking with Google, of course he's likely to come away with the idea
that Google is doing everything just fine.
When you read the report, it's clear this isn't the case. Google does come
under criticism. It's also important to realize Tuzhilin was not employed by Google to
create this report. He's an independent expert appointed to my knowledge by the
court. Exactly how he was selected is unclear, and I do think it would be a
better report if advertiser data had been involved. But there's still plenty of
good stuff here to digest.
Page 2 covers his background and materials reviewed from Google to prepare
the report.
Page 3 and some of page 4 covers those he talked with at Google. Interesting
details are that Google's click quality team consists of about 36 people,
one-third engineers looking to design detection systems and the remaining
two-thirds dedicated to doing manual investigations of suspected fraud.
Pages 4 through 6 cover the history of the internet, search engines and
Google, most of which isn't that necessary for most experienced search
marketers. Page 7 talks about three main ways of purchasing advertising:
- CPM - cost per impression
- CPC - cost per click
- CPA - cost per action
Again, basic stuff. But it's worth touching on because of some of the current
debate that Google and other search engines will be forced to go to CPA pricing
to fully eliminate fraud.
On page 8, Tuzhilin lends some support of this, or at least the problems that
others have raised with CPC:
Although currently popular, the CPC/PPC model has two fundamental problems:
- Although correlated, good click-through rates (CTRs) are still not
indicative of good conversion rates, since it is still not clear if a
visitor would buy an advertised product once he or she clicked on the ad. In
this respect, the CPA-based models provide better solutions for the
advertisers (but not necessarily for the search engines), since they are
more indicative that their ads are working.
- It does not offer any built-in fundamental protection mechanisms
against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are
valid vs. invalid in general, as will be explained in Section 8 (it can be
done relatively easily in some special cases, but not in general). For this
reason, major search engines launched extensive invalid click detection
programs and still face problems combating click fraud.
In response to these two problems and for various other business reasons,
Google is currently testing a CPA payment model, according to some reports in
the media. Some analysts believe that the conversion-based CPA model is more
robust for the advertisers and also less prone to click fraud. Therefore, they
believe that the future of the online advertising payments lies with the CPA
model. Although this is only a belief that is not supported by strong evidence
yet, Google is getting ready for the next stage of the online advertising
marathon.
What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? over at Publishing 2.0 from
Scott Karp is a good roundup and debate on some of the issues of CPA perhaps as
the solution to CPC issues.
I've posted lots of comments in Karp's post, but my personal
view is this. Currently, Google is offering all three major payment systems:
CPC, CPM and CPA. It is offering all three not just because of fraud issues but
because advertisers have different goals with advertising, where different
payment models may be required.
Building brand? You want impressions perhaps more than clickthrough, and
suddenly CPM makes sense. Really savvy with conversion tracking? CPA might make
more sense for you, as a way for you to feel less likely to be exposed to fraud
and more likely to really be paying only for key traffic. Fairly rudimentary
with conversion tracking? Doing low-cost CPC ads might make a lot of sense, for
your situation. And beyond the three big ones, I'm sure we'll see other options
emerge. The unifying goal around all of them, from Google's perspective, will be
figuring out a way to help advertisers track that the ads are working according
to some type of metrics that the advertisers want.
Skipping down past background on how AdWords works and the AdSense program (AdSense
For Domains doesn't get mentioned, though it's a major program), page 13 starts
in on what Google can tell about clicking activities.
Google is apparently
making use of conversion data that advertisers provide to determine if
fraudulent clicks are happening. My understanding was that conversion data was
supposed to be ringfenced and not used by Google for anything, not even in the
aggregate. But perhaps the policy has changed or perhaps I misunderstood this.
I'll check on that (and also note that confusingly, the report says on page 34
that "None of the filters uses the conversion information that Google collects"). Certainly Google made no such restrictions when it launched
Google Checkout. But even with conversion data, the report notes using this info
isn't perfect.
Google collects various types of information about querying and clicking
activities, including certain types of post-clicking data about conversion
actions on the advertisers website where the visitor is taken following the
click. All this data accumulated by Google is extracted from various sources and
contains comprehensive information about visitors activities on the Google
Network.
As stated before, the conversion data the post-clicking data about
conversion actions on the advertisers website constitutes an important piece
of this collected data. In particular, if the advertiser formally agrees to
provide this information, Google collects data on whether or not the user
visited certain designated pages on the advertised website that the advertiser
marked as conversion pages, such as the checkout page and certain form filling
pages. This conversion data is limited to what the advertiser decided to provide
to Google and is not as rich as the clickstream data collected by advertisers
themselves on their websites. Also, many advertisers decide to opt out from
providing this conversion data. In this case, Google does not have any
conversion information and therefore does not know what happened after a visitor
clicked on the ad. Nevertheless, this post-clicking conversion data is important
for Google even in its limited form because it conveys some intentions of the
visitors on the advertised website and provides good insights into whether or
not the visitor is seriously considering purchasing the advertised product or
service....
This raw clicking data described above is subsequently cleaned,
preprocessed and stored in various internal logs by Google for different types
of subsequent analysis conducted on this data.
One inherent weakness of Googles (or any other search engine) data
collection effort that is important for detecting invalid clicks, is inability
to get full access to all the clicking activities of the visitors of the
advertised website. In other words, the conversion data that Google collects
provides only a partial picture of all the post-clicking activities of the
visitor on the advertised website. This data is important for detecting invalid
clicks since better invalid click detection methods can be developed using this
data. Unfortunately, Google (and other search engines) does not have full access
to this data, unless the advertised website decides to provide its clickstream
data to Google, which many websites are reluctant to do. However, this is not
Googles fault this is an inherent limitation of the types of data available
to Google.
While it might not be perfect, the report also notes at the end of this
section that no one has the perfect collection of information:
However, this lack of full conversion data available to Google is compensated
by various types of querying and clicking data that Google can collect, whereas
advertisers and third-party vendors cannot. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff
between the types of data relevant for detecting invalid clicks that is
available to Google, advertisers and the thirdparty vendors. None of these three
groups have the most comprehensive set of data pertinent to detecting invalid
clicks, and each of them needs to settle for the invalid click detection methods
possible only with the data that they have.
On page 14, the report addresses the frustration advertisers feel over the
relatively non-granular nature of Google's reporting versus Google's need to
keep some things carefully protected:
The smallest unit of analysis is one day. For example, the number of invalid
clicks on an ad detected by Google (or any other related statistic) can only be
reported on a daily basis (although there are certain alternative methods of
obtaining aggregation granularity that is smaller than a day). In other words,
advertisers cannot know if a particular click on a particular ad was marked as
valid or invalid by Google, and Google refuses to provide this information to
advertisers.
This is a source of contention and dispute between Google and the
advertisers, and one can understand both parties in this dispute. On one hand,
the advertiser has the right to know why a particular click was marked as valid
by Google (when the advertiser thinks that it is invalid) because the advertiser
pays for this click. On the other hand, if Google discloses this information, it
opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides
certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work. This means
that unethical users will immediately take advantage of this information to
conduct more sophisticated fraudulent activities undetectable by Googles
methods.
This conflicting dilemma between advertisers right to know and Googles
inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the
security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC advertising
model to be discussed in the next section. More recently, Google tried to bridge
this gap between Google and the advertisers.
Page 15 spends time looking at various definitions of click fraud, bringing
us to page 16 which raises the bigger issue that it is impossible to know the
intent of ALL clicks, which is crucial to understand what chunk of them might be
fraudulent:
Unfortunately, in several cases it is hard or even impossible to determine
the true intent of a click using any technological means. For example, a person
might have clicked on an ad, looked at it, went somewhere else but then decided
to have another look at the ad shortly thereafter to make sure that he/she got
all the necessary information from the ad. Is this second click invalid? To make
things even more complicated, the second click may not be strictly necessary
since the person remembers the content of the ad reasonably well (hence there is
no real need for the second click). However, the person may not really like or
care about the advertiser and decides to make this second click anyway (to make
sure that he/she did not miss anything in the ad and his/her information is
indeed correct) without any concerns that the advertiser may end up paying for
this second click (since the person really does not care about the advertiser
and his/her own interests of not missing anything in the ad overweigh the
concerns of hurting the advertiser). Therefore, in some cases the true intent of
a click can be identified only after examining deep psychological processes,
subtle nuances of human behavior and other considerations in the mind of the
clicking person.
Soon after this, on page 17, comes the first real bombshell to me. As said
above, you can't detect the intent of all clicks. Given this, there's no
reasonable way to be certain that technological fixes for click fraud detection
are working:
In summary, between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks,
lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is
far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including
the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity
of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and
detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.
What? Didn't the report find Google was acting reasonably? Yes, and I think
this is is because as the report goes on, it's because Google's not relying
solely on automated means to stop click fraud, which might allow some clicks to
get through, if that were only the case.
Page 18 picks of the issue even more strongly, and I've bolded this section
because it deserves special attention. Note that the italics were originally
included:
The last statement has one important implication: given a particular click
in a log file, it is impossible to say with certainty if this click is valid
or not in all the cases. This means that
- It is impossible to measure the true rates of invalid clicking
activities, and all the reports published in the business press are only
guesstimates at best.
- The invalid click detection methods need to be developed without
a proper operationalizable conceptual definition of invalid clicks.
The important word above is all the cases since in some cases it
can be stated with certainty if a particular click is valid or not. For example,
it is easy to detect a doubleclick using relatively simple technological means,
assuming that the doubleclick is invalid.
Again, it seems to be a case that automation can catch some, perhaps lots of click
fraud, but it can't catch all of it because the intent problem. Also crucial in
the above is the stressing that rates we've been given from various sources are
simply guesses, since the intent of clicks aren't know to some of these other
sources.
Indeed, in the case of the recent Outsell
report, you
don't even have to worry about figuring out the intent of particular clicks.
Click fraud stats from that report come from half the panel entirely guessing
about what click fraud rates they might have -- guessing, because that half does
not auditing of clicks at all.
Page 19 deals with ways of identifying invalid clicks, at least according to
operational approaches -- IE, automated criteria. Do the clicks show some type
of:
- Anomaly from past clicking patterns for a site or ad?
- Violate certain predefined rules?
- Fall into certain classes of behavior that make them deemed invalid?
Page 20 explains that Google primarily depends on the first two approaches --
looking for anomalies and using rules -- but then gets into what it stresses as
the "Fundamental Problem" of fraudulent clicks:
We conclude that there is a fundamental problem associated with the
definition of invalid clicks for the Pay-per-Click model. This problem can be
summarized as follows:
- There is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be
operationalized in the sense defined above.
- An operational definition cannot be fully disclosed to the general
public because of the concerns that unethical users will take advantage of
it, which may lead to a massive click fraud. However, if it is not
disclosed, advertisers cannot verify or even dispute why they have been
charged for certain clicks.
This problem lies at the heart of the click fraud debate and constitutes the
main problem of the CPC model: it is inherently vulnerable to click fraud.
Page 21 poses solutions to the problem:
- The trust us approach of the search engines. The search engines can
assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to protect them
against the click fraud. This is not easy because of the inherent conflict of
interest between the two parties: the money from invalid clicks directly
contribute to the bottom lines of the search engines. Nevertheless, it may be
possible for the search engines to solve this trust problem by developing
lasting relationships with the advertisers. However, the discussion of how
this can be done lies outside of the scope of this report.
- Third-party auditors. Independent third-party vendors, who have no
financial conflicts of interest, can work with advertisers and audit their
clickstream files to detect invalid clicks.
These two approaches would still constitute only a partial solution to the
Fundamental Problem because there is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks
that can be operationalized.
Page 21 continues on looking at how Google does click fraud detection,
covering a range of general preventative measure and more active things done
when clicks actually happen.
On page 23, a look at filtering systems begins, ending with this summary
that's positive for Google, at the moment. It also stresses that filtering will
always come under new challenges:
The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic
tuning and maintenance rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major
fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network. It also demonstrates
that various recent efforts of the Click Quality team to improve performance of
their filters produce only incremental improvements. Thus, the Click Quality
team currently reached a stability point since additional efforts to enhance
filters produce only marginal improvements.
Having said this, the Click Quality team also realizes that this is only a
local stability point in the sense that major future modifications in clicking
patterns of online users and new types of fraudulent attacks against Google can
lead to radically new types of invalid clicks that the current set of filters
can miss. Therefore, the Click Quality team is working on the next generation of
more powerful filters that will monitor a broader set of signals and more
complex monitoring conditions. These new filters will require a more powerful
computing infrastructure than is currently available, and the Click Quality team
also participates in developing this infrastructure. Their overall goal is to
make click spam hard and unrewarding for the unethical users thus making it
uneconomical for them and turning many of them away from Google and the Google
Network.
At page 28, the expert notes that Google's filters are relatively simple in
nature, yet they work:
The structure of most of Googles filters, with a few exceptions, is
surprisingly simple. I was initially puzzled and thought that Google did not do
a reasonable job in developing better and more sophisticated filters. I was
initially certain that these simple filters should miss many types of more
complicated attacks. However, the evidence reported in the previous two sections
indicates that these simple filters perform reasonably well.
Why? A variety of reasons, such unsophisticated attacks:
Although some of the coordinated attacks can be quite sophisticated, the
majority of the invalid clicks usually come from relatively simple sources and
less experienced perpetrators....Still, there are certain types of attacks that Google filters will miss; but
these attacks should be quite sophisticated and would require significant
ingenuity to launch. Therefore, there cannot be too many of these, unless
perpetrators become much more imaginative....
The Long Tail / Search Tail even
gets a mention, with the idea being that -- if I understand correctly -- most
activity focuses around the same type of things that the filters work well to
detect. IE, the filters do well at cutting off the head of click fraud -- and if
tail activity gets through, it's relatively little in comparison:
Despite its current reasonable performance, this situation may change
significantly in the future if new attacks will shift towards the Long Tail of
the Zipf distribution by becoming more sophisticated and diverse.
At the bottom of page 29, the report starts examining whether Google is
letting stuff slide to earn more money:
Since Google does not charge advertisers for invalid clicks, this means that
it loses money by filtering out these clicks. Thus, there is a financial
incentive for Google not to forgo some of these revenues and simply be easy
Long Tail Left Part Frequency Rank 30 on filtering out invalid clicks.
Therefore, it is important to know if any business considerations entered into
the filter specification process or is it entirely determined by Googles
engineers in an objective manner with a single purpose to protect the advertiser
base. This is one of the important issues that I investigated as a part of my
studies of how Google manages detection of invalid clicks....
The conclusion is that Google isn't trying to favor itself:
I have spent a significant amount of time trying to understand who sets these
threshold parameters, how, and what are the procedures and processes for setting
them. In particular, I tried to understand if it is an entirely engineering
decision that tries to protect the advertisers from invalid clicks or any of the
business groups at Google are involved in this decision process with the purpose
of influencing it towards generating extra revenues for Google.
As a result of these investigations, I realized that it constitutes
exclusively an engineering decision with no inputs from the finance department
or the business units, except the following two cases:
- The first one was a special case when one particular IP address was
disabled because of inappropriate clicking activities, and a business unit
requested the Click Quality team to conduct an additional investigation since
it was an important customer associated with that IP address, and restore it
if the investigation results were negative. When I was explained what had
happened, I felt that Googles actions were reasonable in this particular
situation.
- The change in the doubleclick policy that was considered in Winter 2005
and implemented in March 2005. It turned out that the change in the
doubleclick policy (i.e., not to charge advertisers for the immediate second
click in a doubleclick) had non-trivial financial implications for Google.
Being a publicly traded company at that time, this change would have had a
noticeable effect on Googles total revenues with corresponding implications
for the financial performance of the company. Therefore, this policy change
had legitimate concerns for Googles management, and these financial
implications have been discussed in the company. Still, despite its noticeable
negative effects on its financial performance, Google decided to abandon the
old doubleclick policy and not to charge advertisers for the second click,
which was an appropriate action to take.
In conclusion, with the exception of the doubleclick, I found Googles
processes for specifying filters and setting parameters in these filters driven
exclusively by the consideration to protect the advertiser base, and, therefore,
being reasonable.
Doubleclick constitutes a special case. For me, the second click in the
doubleclick is invalid, as I argued in Section 8, and the advertisers should not
be charged for it. It is not clear to me why it took Google so long to revise
the policy of charging for doubleclicks. Nevertheless, this policy was revised
in March 2005 despite the fact that the company lost noticeable revenues by
taking this action.
I find the conclusion that Google wasn't trying to benefit itself doesn't
mesh well with the expert's own concern/confusion/uncertainty about why Google
took so long to change its policy on doubleclicks. Moreover, that entire policy
isn't well explained. Way back up on page 20, there's this very brief mention:
It turns out that Google had a history associated with the definition of a
doubleclick: at some point doubleclick was considered to be a valid click and
advertisers were charged for it, while subsequently Google reconsidered and
treated doubleclick as invalid.
And that's it until the section later in the report, where Google's
effectively accused of footdragging on changing its policy, where business
discussions about the change were made, but Google then seems to be given the
all clear because eventually it did the right thing.
The entire matter is something that feels like it should have been explored
more, but page 31 sheds light as to why this might have been difficult. Google's
apparently had a complete staff change in relation to click fraud detection
since it began charging by the click:
In this subsection, I will describe the history of development of Google
filters. First of all, I would like to point out that most of the descriptions
in this subsection are not based on documents provided to me by Google but
rather on the verbal descriptions by the members of the Click Quality team based
on their recollections of the past events and on the folklore evidence since
none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click
fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.
The section continues with detection divided into these groupings -- and I've
bolded a key part:
- The Early Days (February 2002 Summer 2003). These were the early days of
the PPC model and of the click fraud characterized by extensive learning about
the problem and determining ways to deal with it.
- The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 Fall 2005). This stage started with the
introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003, formation of the Google
Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003, launch of new filters and the
intent to take the invalid click detection efforts to the next level. It
ended with the development of the whole infrastructure for combating invalid
clicks and the consolidation of Googles invalid click detection efforts. This
stage was characterized by significant progress in combating invalid clicking
activities and developing mature systems and processes for accomplishing this
task. Although the Click Quality teams solutions were still not perfect,
based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion
that the invalid clicking problem at Google was under control by the end of
2005.
- The Consolidation Stage (Fall 2005 present). By this time, Google had
enough filters and perfected them to the level when they would detect most of
the invalid clicking activities in the Left Part of the Zipf distribution (see
Figure 1) and some of the attacks in the Long Tail. They would still miss more
sophisticated attacks 32 in the Long Tail, and the Click Quality team
continued working on the neverending process of improving their filters to
detect and prevent new attacks. The Click Quality team has also been working
on enhancing their infrastructure and improving their processes....
What? Click fraud wasn't under control until the end of 2005, yet Google is
said to have acted reasonably by the report? How does this make sense? The best
explanation seems to be that as the report goes on, the author feels click fraud
was an evolving problem, and that Google was reasonably reacting to prevent it
even though it wasn't "under control" until the end of last year. In contrast,
had Google been doing nothing, then it might have been deemed not to have been
taking reasonable steps to gain control.
Page 32 looks at the early days and notes that for a year and a half, no new
filters were added other than the three original ones that CPC-based AdWords
started with. Why? Maybe click fraud was less understood at that time since it
was so new (though Search Engine Watch was citing articles on the problem like
this one
from Wired as far back as 2001). That's one suggestion, along with Google having
fewer resources, lacking the right infrastructure or click fraud being on a
smaller scale. But these are all guesses, since as the author notes (again, I've
bolded a key part):
Not a single person on the Click Quality team was either around or involved
in the click fraud detection back in 2002. The only person from this era who is
still at Google is on an extended leave and was not available for comments
during my visits to Google.
It is hard to judge reasonableness of Googles invalid click detection
efforts between 2002 and summer 2003 because there is simply not enough
information available for this time period for me to form an informed judgment
about this matter. One exception is the doubleclick policy that I have described
before. As I have already stated, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid
in my opinion, and Google should have identified it as such well before March
2005 (however, the detection and filtering out the third, fourth and other
subsequent clicks was there since the introduction of the PPC model, and
advertisers were not charged for these extra clicks).
Again, I get confused by the report declaring that Google operated reasonably
when it also states that it can't judge if it indeed acted reasonably for part
of the claim period.
The middle period finds progress with far more confidence, as covered on page
33:
The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 Fall 2005). This stage started with the
introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003 and the formation of the
Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003 (the first person was hired
in April 2003 with the mandate to form the Click Quality team; several people
joined the team during the summer of 2003, and the initial core team
consisting of Operations and Engineering groups was consolidated by Fall 2003).
During this time period, two new filters were introduced in Summer 2003 and
one more in January 2004. These three new filters remedied several problems that
existed since the launch of the first three filters and significantly advanced
Googles invalid click detection efforts. Besides the development of new and
better filters, there was a separate effort launched to develop the whole
infrastructure for doing the offline analysis of invalid clicks and managing
customer inquiries about invalid clicks and billing charges.
Despite all these efforts, the new filters and the offline analysis methods
still failed to detect some of the more sophisticated attacks (presumably from
the Long Tail of the Figure 1) launched against the Google Network in 2004 and
the first half of 2005. In response to these activities and as a part of the
overall invalid click detection effort, Google engineers introduced some
additional filters around Winter and Spring 2005, including the filter
identifying the second immediate click in a doubleclick as invalid.
As a result of all of these efforts by the Click Quality team, a significant
progress has been made in combating invalid clicking activities and developing
mature systems and processes to accomplish this task. Although the Click Quality
teams solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me
by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google
was under control by the end of 2005.
And overall filtering is given this conclusion at the top of page 35:
Google put much effort in developing infrastructure, methods and processes
for detecting invalid clicks since the Click Quality team was established in
2003. These efforts were not perfect since Google missed certain amounts of
invalid clicks over these years and it adhered to the doubleclicking policy for
too long in my opinion. However, click fraud is a very difficult problem to
solve, Google put a significant effort to solve it, and I find their efforts to
filter out invalid clicks as being reasonable, especially after the doubleclick
policy was reversed in March 2005.
Page 35 then begins looking at "offline" or non-automated ways to find click
fraud that's gotten past filters. By page 37, it gets into systems applied to
review what happens on some AdSense sites:
Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the
AdSense publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms
and Conditions of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various
publishers and either immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are
engaged in the activities that the system finds to be inappropriate.
Interestingly, the system is still relatively new, only about a year old, as
explained on page 38:
The first prototype of the auto-termination system was built in the early
2005 and the system was launched in the summer 2005. Recently, Google has
developed major enhancements to the current version of the auto-termination
system deploying an alternative set of technologies.
Page 38 also starts a look at the manual review that the click fraud team
does, with this positive summary coming on page 40:
I have personally observed several such inspections
and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Googles
investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the
inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of
professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of
certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the
investigators in the inspection process.
However, using humans also poses a bottleneck, as covered on page 41:
My only concern with these manual inspections is about scalability of the
inspection process. Since the number of inquiries grows rapidly, so does the
number of inspections required to investigate these inquiries. As stated before,
Google tries to automate this process by letting software systems do a sizable
number of inspections. Still, the number of manual inspections keeps growing
significantly over time, based on the numbers that I have seen. This means that
Google has a challenging task of expanding and properly training its team of
inspectors to assure rapid high-quality inspections of inquiries in the future.
Page 41 also revisits the tug-of-war between advertisers wanting more
transparency and Google trying to protect against click fraud by giving too much
information away:
One of the complaints about Googles investigation system that I keep hearing
is that Google is quite secretive and does not provide meaningful explanations
of the inspection results neither to the advertisers nor to the publishers.
After examining how their inspection systems work, I can understand this
secrecy. If Google provides such explanations, then the unethical users can gain
additional insights into how Google invalid click detection methods work and
would be able to game their detection methods much better, thus creating a
possibility of massive click fraud. To avoid these problems, Google prefers to
be secretive rather than to risk compromising their detection systems and the
advertiser base.
And this interesting tidbit on how when someone gets kicked out of AdSense,
advertisers apparently get refunds:
Finally, I would like to point out that when Google terminates an AdSense
publisher, all the clicks generated at that publishers site over a certain time
period (valid and invalid) are credited to the advertisers whose ads were
clicked on that site....
How well are things going? That begins to be addressed at the bottom of page
41, and here's a key statement from page 42:
The number of inquiries about invalid clicks for the Click Quality team
increased drastically since late 2004. However, the number of refunds for
invalid clicks provided by Google did not change significantly over the same
time period. Therefore, the number of refunds per inquiry decreased
drastically since late 2004. Since each inquiry about invalid clicks leads to an
investigation, this means that significantly fewer investigations result in
refunds. This statistic can be interpreted in several ways. First, it can be an
indication that Googles invalid click detection methods have significantly
improved over this time period and that reactive investigations do not find any
problems when searching for invalid clicks. Second, this statistic can mean that
Google tightened its refund policies and is less generous with its refunds than
it used to be. Third, this statistic can mean that more advertisers are looking
more carefully into their logs and are more suspicious about invalid clicks
since this problem received wide attention in the media and the public discourse
in general. Therefore, they may request Google to investigate suspicious
clicking activities even if nothing really happened. I examined investigative
activities of the Google Click Quality team and can attest that it consists of a
group of highly professional employees who do their investigations carefully and
professionally. Therefore, I do not believe in the second reason stated above.
The third reason is quite possible since advertisers are indeed concerned about
invalid clicks and request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities
more frequently than before. However, the number of inquiries increased so
significantly that I would expect that the number of refunds would also increase
somewhat. Since this did not happen, I attribute this effect to the fact that
Googles invalid click detection methods work reasonably well by now.
I've bolded the most important parts to me. The expert is saying that more
advertisers are raising inquiries, probably because of increased concerns (which
we know is the case from various surveys over the past two years) but that
Google isn't refunding more. Nor is that Google just protecting itself, the
expert says. To him, it's a case that the concerns aren't matching the reality.
Click fraud -- bad clicks getting past Google -- do not appear to be on the
rise.
Nor is click fraud getting past filters a major problem compared to the
amount Google is proactively catching, the expert says:
The total amount of reactive refunds that Google provides to advertisers as a
result of their inquiries is miniscule in comparison to the potential revenues
that Google foregoes due to the removal of invalid clicks (and not charging
advertisers for them).
Another interesting part is how Google is comparing traffic across its
network to that from within Google.com, which is said to be a "gold standard" of
a pure site. The network is said to compare well:
Another indirect piece of evidence provided to me by Google is that
Conversions-Per- Dollar (CPD) rates on various partner sites of Google Network
are not significantly lower than on their flagship Google.com site. CPD is the
statistic determining the number of conversions that occurred divided by the
dollar amount spent on advertising. This statistic shows how effective
advertising campaigns are for the advertisers. Since Google spent much effort
over the past 4.5 years to make sure that Googles AdWords program works
reasonably well, it now serves as the golden standard against which other
programs are compared at Google. Since CPD numbers for other parts of the Google
Network approach that of at Google.com, this is an indication that other
advertising programs work as well as AdWords works on Google.com. Since other
parts of the Google Network are affected by invalid clicking activities
significantly more than Google.com, this is an indication to the Click Quality
team that their efforts to combat fraud on other parts of the Google Network are
as effective as on Google.com.
At the bottom of page 43 is an overall conclusion about that Google's doing a
reasonable job with detection, as best as this scientist can tell. It also takes
some slams at general reports of click fraud being widespread in the press as
not being proven true or false yet. I've bolded the key paragraph for all this
below:
As a scientist, I am accustomed to seeing more direct, objective and
conclusive evidence that certain methods and approaches work. Having said
this, I fully understand the difficulties of obtaining such measures for invalid
clicks by Google, as previously discussed in this report. Moreover, one can
challenge most of the reports pertaining to invalid clicking rates published in
the business press by questioning their methodologies and assumptions used for
calculating these rates. Most of these reports would not stand hard scientific
scrutiny.
Still, as a scientist, it is hard for me to arrive at any definitive
conclusions beyond any reasonable doubt based on Points (1) (6) above that
Googles invalid click detection methods work well and remove most of the
invalid clicks the provided evidence is simply not hard enough for me, and I
am used to dealing with much more conclusive evidence in my scientific work.
Having said this, the indirect evidence (1) (6) specified above,
nevertheless, provides a sufficient degree of comfort for me to conclude that
these filters work reasonably well. Finally, this statement should not be
interpreted as if I find Googles effort to detect invalid clicks (a)
unreasonable, or (b) not working reasonably well. It only states that Google did
not provide a compelling amount of conclusive evidence demonstrating the
effectiveness of their approach that would satisfy me as a scientist.
Finally, the measures (1) (6) above are only statistical measures
providing some evidence that Googles filters work reasonably well. This does
not mean, however, that any particular advertiser cannot be hurt badly by
fraudulent attacks, given the evidence that Google filters work. Since Google
has a very large number of advertisers, one particular bad incident will be lost
in the overall statistics. Good performance measures indicative that filters
work well only mean that there will be relatively few such bad cases.
Therefore, any reports published in the business press about particular
advertisers being hurt by particular fraudulent attacks do not mean that the
phenomenon is widespread. One simply should not generalize such incidents to
other cases and draw premature conclusions we simply do not have evidence for
or against this.
Page 44 has a section that restates conclusions in terms of economic aspects
-- IE, any economic motivation for Google to hide or ignore click fraud:
First of all, most of the revenue that Google foregoes due to discarding
invalid clicks comes from the filters since they identify most of the invalid
clicks. The second source of the forgone revenues comes from the terminated
AdSense publishers (as stated before, all the clicks made on the terminated
publishers website generated over a certain time period are credited back to
the advertisers regardless of whether they are valid or invalid). However, this
second type of revenue is relatively small in comparison to the foregone
revenues due to filters. The third source of the foregone revenues comes from
the AdWords credits. However, these AdWord credits are miniscule in comparison
to the other sources of foregone revenues. In summary, the most significant
source of foregone revenues, by far, are Google filters. Hence their performance
is the most crucial factor for the whole invalid click detection program (note
that this observation does not mean that Google focuses mainly on this part of
the invalid click detection program since other parts are also important)....
It makes no business sense for Google to go after these extra revenues and
that the best long-term business policy for Google is to protect advertisers
against invalid clicks. Policy reversal on the doubleclick is a good example of
this. By not charging advertisers for the doubleclick since March 2005, Google
lost a noticeable amount of revenues. However, the revenues lost as a result
of this action are insignificant in comparison to the revenues that Google risks
to lose if it loses trust of the advertisers. Therefore, reversing the
doubleclick policy makes sense not only from the legal, ethical and public
relations point of view, but it is also a sound economic decision.
Finally, the beginning of page 46 gives this overall conclusion:
Google has built the following four lines of defense against invalid
clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual
offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in
each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the
pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three
approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based
approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different
methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks
using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more
invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early
stages.
Since its establishment in the Spring and Summer of 2003 the Click Quality
team has been developing an infrastructure for detecting and removing invalid
clicks and implementing various methods in the four detection stages described
above. Currently, they reached a consolidation phase in their efforts, when
their methods work reasonably |
