Click fraud is obviously a problem but no one knows just how much. That in itself is another problem and I happen to think that the majority of fraudulent clicks go overlooked or undetected. There is just too much outside of Google, Yahoo, and MSN that we can't accurately measure from a big picture point of view. Especially since most examples seen in forums or blogs are just that, examples of a small (or maybe large) percentage of the problem.

I compare pay per click to running a jewelry store in a building owned by Google. You pay Google for every visitor that walks through the door. However that visitor can go outside, throw on some new clothes, come back in and you would never know it was the same visitor. Obviously if you don't interact or get any information from the person, you might not notice until they came back for the 4th or 5th time, especially if it was busy in the store. Or you might have a group of 10 visitors all hired by the same competitor who come into the store, take a glance and leave. Bad analogy I know but for those who have trouble relating to click fraud, it might make more sense. The point is, you can't control who comes in your door and you can't tell whats going on outside of it. But interaction will allow you to track things a lot more accurately.

I started this thread because I am looking for feedback. In my mind, PPC advertising is a two-fold advertising platform. The first being a branding tool much like a billboard in the sense that a PPC ad is seen on the SERP's or on an Adsense partner. You can put a billboard next to the highway but measuring your return on that advertising is somewhat difficult at best unless your really into grilling your customers. Your basically giving money away, targeting a large number of people in hopes of drawing their attention and hopefully their business.

However the second is that I believe conversions are pure gold and at its best a decent analytics tool in that results are measurable on the PPC platform. Because no one really knows how big of a problem click fraud is, conversions do not really quantify an accurate CTR or CPC. However I think conversions provide a solid and reasonable alternative (not a solution) to pay per click. In my opinion, pay per action seems to me like it would put a huge dent in the click fraud problem. Forging clicks is easy, forging an online sale is not.

Pay per click was a great idea initially but in order for a product to lengthen its life cycle or even restart it, you have to modify it. Windows XP (only an example) would have been long removed if Microsoft had never made any patches or improvements for it. Adwords should be no different. I don't believe the problem can be solved by algorithms alone and because of its scale, it makes sense to change the product.

So to conclude my long drawn out thoughts, the feedback I seek is for the following:

1. What drawbacks are there for pay per action engines like Snap (http://www.snap.com/about/index.php?page_id=1)?

2. What other alternatives are there out there? Obviously the big 3 won't be going toward pay per action anytime soon because that would cut some pretty big holes in their money bags, so what can advertisers do?


**Notes
I'm looking for realistic solutions, not more examples so if you feel like whining, please don't post here.

Mark Cuban Comments (http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000257073723/)

Hello Marketing Man -

I like your idea of click charges per person and not how many times they click. I use some web statistics called Hitslink. It shows total number of visitors and total number of new visitors. No doubt they do this off of the IP address of the visitor computer. So yes it is possible. Getting Google to do something about it is another issue that their shareholders may not vote for.

I may confirm that I may multiple click when buying something on the web. You try a few websites -- your selection set - you should know this term Marketing Man. As your narrow your selection there may be more clicks as the selection set narrows. Then when you go to buy from a site after evaluating several sites you may have another click. Why do I do this - multiple clicks? Because I did not shortcut or place in favorite the sites in my selection set because Google has already done this for me in their list of sponsored Ads.


I thought of a partial remedy for "clickfraud" [independent of the idea above]. It is based on some measure of the extent of the problem. Remedy: say clickfraud is 10%. Then, Google could adjust prices down 1% a month for 10 months - and implement some ongoing adjustments. No doubt Google will throw up the point that clickfraud can not be measured accurately to remedy in this way. Yet they could do a partial adjustment - say the consensus is clickfraud is 10%. Google could be conservative and adjust by 5,6 or 7%.

Google says that they have measures to combat clickfraud. What are these measures? Part of what they do must be taking account of the IP address of the clicker.

GAustralia

I am not posting any idea or suggestion because I simply could not find one.
Click fraud is really difficult problem to combat.

Monitoring the IP addresses of traffic sent from your various advertisers is an important way to check for obvious click fraud, though people can find you through a few searches or banners.... it's not like we run the same for every keyword and placement....

I believe the strongest part of any solution is giving the advertiser full control of how and where their ad displays.

To use Marketing Guys analogy:
A guy comes in every day with the morning rush crowd and robs the jewelry store of a $10 pen. After 5 days of this you tell the police officer out front. Hey every day at 8 AM the same guy with one leg, three eyes and a I Love Warez tattoo on his forehead comes in and robs me.. And the officer tells you? Sorry that guy comes in every day with a bunch of other really nice people I can either through them all out or you have to take them all.

Google is the first and only line of defense against fraud, but their is a huge anti click fraud force waiting to join the battle. We the advertisers are ready to be the second line of defense.. and we have a lot of power in our numbers, but we lack access to the tools.

We already have the tools to monitor our traffic now we need to have the power to block ANY and ALL domains which are sending us junk clicks or straight out fraudulent clicks. Even better; block an entire search partner, such as the tool bar click junkies.

Then we need the ability to block individual IP addresses, again that are producing junk clicks and or fraudulent clicks.

No this will not stop all fraudulent clicks and yes it would add to our daily work routine. However, I believe that given these tools advertisers and the bigs could combine our efforts and put a severe dent in the click fraud industry.

The bigger picture:
We know the bigs will not implement the above solution or any other solution suggested here because they will take a large hit on revenue. So the question for another thread is: How can we bring this issue to a head to force change? What is the response given by Google, MSN and YSM when asked why they won't allow advertisers to control where their ads run? Or self police their paid for traffic? They can only evade the question so long as we in forums like this don't join together and force the issue publicly. And this is exactly what we need to do.


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