ack in the early days of search engine marketing, Goto.com brought the “Pay Per Click” model to the masses. Eventually changing it’s name to Overture and then being Acquired by Yahoo, Goto.com started a frenzy of PPC search engines, and as with all revenue generating opportunities, along came the fraud. “Click Fraud” became an every day term on the Internet.
While Google started with the CPM model for Adwords, they eventually moved over to PPC as well and the fraud got bigger. To this day I am personally banned from Google because I refused to pay for $4,000 worth of clicks that suddenly came out of no where at 3am one night.
Well here we are again. With a whole new slew of advertising networks charging you on a per-click basis, and paying publishers on a per-click basis. The difference now is that without Javascript on the phone, the ads look like simple links to incoming search engine spiders and bots. Who’s paying for those clicks??? Who’s getting paid???
As an advertiser, why should I pay for clicks that come from a search crawler? The ad network is making some serious margin on those clicks. Also, as a publisher, how hard is it for me to write a spider to hit my site a few hundred times a day?
Back in September, there was a posting on SearchEngineLand.com on this topic. It’s pretty long so you can read it over there. In the post, Chris Smith points out the issues with mobile click fraud.
Cookies, IP Address, and Geolocation are all some of the primary components that are used by ad networks to identify individual user requests (ad clicks). These components are used to help verify if an ad’s click comes from a single individual versus thousands of individuals. For instance, in classic PPC ads, if a campaign received thousands of clicks on a particular day, and all those clicks came from a common IP Address and/or cookie ID, it would be very strong evidence that the clicks were fraudulent — one computer issuing automatic click requests. Further, if the advertisers’ products were only offered for sale in America, and thousands of clicks were pouring in from China, one would suspect another bot, or a sweatshop full of people paid to click on ads all day long…
Using a mobile specific analytics package like Mobilytics, we go beyond IP address, Cookies and GeoLocation. We specifically track other information specific to the phone, the carrier, the subscriber, features, etc…
Don’t expect the ad networks to protect you. As long as you are paying them for the clicks, they will let it continue.
This issue of a weakened ability to filter invalid clicks for mobile ads is likely something that will be addressed to some degree by the Mobile Advertising Committee of the Internet Advertising Bureau. But, that committee was only announced in October of last year, and it doesn’t appear that any guidelines for mobile advertising have been released from them as of yet. We should hope that when guidelines are released, they will include specifics on how user identification should be accomplished. Frankly, the time for publicizing a standard is now.
Until then, what should businesses and ad agencies decide about getting involved in mobile advertising? Well, caveat emptor. There is some value to be had in the mobile search space, particularly for local businesses, and companies need to prepare for the growing potential in the channel. Get your feet wet in it, but perhaps treat PPC in mobile as more of a brand-building exercise for now, since it will be hard to assess conversion rates and ROI. Pay-for-Call ads can be highly trustworthy in this space, and for now are the only dependable method of assessing the ROI of mobile ad campaigns.
You must install correct tracking on your mobile site if you want to know what’s really happening. Using either specific Click Fraud Protection, or by simply comparing visitor counts to ad clicks, you should be able to determine if something is not right.
For example,
Let’s say that unnamed ad network shows that you got 79 clicks. Assuming you have statistically correct mobile web analytics installed, you’ll know in an instant by looking at the campaign stats if things are wrong. If it shows 49 mobile phone visitors (and shows you the specific individual visitors and their paths), then you know to raise a flag. If you notice that 30 clicks came from crawlers such as Google, Yahoo, etc.. Then demand a refund from the ad network. Why should you pay for these? If you notice a pattern of clicks that look suspicious, look deeper. Don’t be surprised to find 20 visitors with different handsets passing through your site in exactly the same pattern.
Traditional web analytics will not help you with this. The lack of Javascript, cookies, and variety of mobile handsets and browsers is exactly what makes this fraud possible. It is also what traditional analytics uses to collect it’s stats.
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