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Friday, May 09th, 07:16:01 PM EST |
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Fair Isaac Says They Find Less Click Fraud Than Headlines Report
Fair Isaac is one of the leading fraud detection companies in the world, and is an organization I have a great deal of respect for. I have spoken with them in the past, and they told us they have been trying to determine if click fraud detection might be a viable business for them. At Google, we’re very happy to see organizations with scientific backgrounds in anomaly detection getting into this space and conducting research. Fair Isaac put out a press release yesterday which has gotten coverage in a number of media outlets. The headlines indicate that Fair Isaac conducted a study which showed that 10-15% of all clicks on online advertising were fraudulent. It turns out this is not true. I spoke with Joe Milana, chief scientist at Fair Isaac, today to find out what the real story was. He told me that most of the headlines and stories were wrong.
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Advertiser Requests on Invalid Clicks
The Click Quality Council is a group of
advertisers which meets regularly to discuss click fraud. A few days ago they
came out with their “Cornerstone Principles for Pay-Per-Click Quality
Improvement” – eight requests from advertisers, similar to Jeffrey Rohrs’
Sausage Manifesto, which also collected and presented advertiser requests in
January. I thought folks might be interested in
where Google stands on some of their requests. Overall, depending on how they
would define some of these items, it looks like we’re already doing these things. Let’s take a look.
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Structure of a Click Fraud Botnet
One question I frequently get asked by some of our more advanced advertisers is "what is Google doing about click fraud from botnets?" Analyzing botnets is an important activity in both our Click Quality and Security Teams. Yesterday, Dr. Neil Daswani, a member of both teams, presented a paper at the HotBots 2007 workshop on a case study of one such botnet we examined last year called Clickbot.A. The paper provides an in-depth look at how a fraudster was attempting to utilize 100,000 machines to execute a low-noise click fraud attack through syndicated search ads.
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Google's Click Quality Team
Readers of this blog know that click fraud is an issue we take very seriously at Google. We throw out a significant percentage of ad clicks (on average in the single digits) every day to protect our advertisers. Because of our investment in click fraud protection systems, we are able to manage this issue very well and prevent it from having an impact on the vast majority of AdWords advertisers.
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Why Third-Party Click Fraud Estimates Don't Add Up
I want to thank everyone who has written to me with questions since I started blogging about the work we do at Google to protect advertisers against click fraud. I'll be catching up on some of those questions in the next week, but today I want to address some of the more recent items in the media on click fraud rates.
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I am Time Magazine's Person of the Year
Time's annual Person of the Year (POTY) issue is coming out on Monday, and guess what. It's me. Well, me, you, and apparently, everyone else in the world. This year's POTY is "You", complete with a mirrored cover to let you look at yourself and contemplate what you'll do next.  After receiving this honor, I had to ask myself (and you should too), are we worthy? Time's unusual decision was apparently due to the massive growth of social networking services and online communities in the past year. Obviously the recognition of sites like YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, and basically all of Web 2.0, is remarkable. Although only coined as a term in 2004 by O'Reilly, Web 2.0 established its business clout this year, and represents a technological realization of the power of the individual. However, when you peel away some layers (metaphorically and technologically), Web 2.0 stands on the shoulders of many giant technologies and ideas. In fact, those giants have also been about leveraging the power of the individual. Think of e-mail. FTP. IM. The web itself. In addition to being information technologies, these have always been communications technologies focused on connecting people. And BBS sites were doing this even before the general population was using the Internet.
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| Tips on how to avoid phishing attacks. Via the Google Blog, here are some recent tips from our security team on how to not get caught by phishing attacks: How to avoid getting hooked. May-02 |
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| Yahoo to add invalid clicks report. It's great to hear that Yahoo will soon be adding this report. I hope that every PPC ad network will provide a feature like this, and was glad when Microsoft added it last year. For details on how to use this feature on Google AdWords, see our blog post. Apr-23 |
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| Back to Facebook. After trying several social apps, I'm back to Facebook. The reason: I think Facebook could do most of what those apps do, and better. All they need to do: offer an additional News Feed that removes the intelligence from the existing code (letting you see all your friends' updates, including from all apps) and let you customize from there. Mar-30 |
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| How Google uses log data to improve search results. Another post in our uses of data series, this time from Paul and Steve from Search Quality on how we comb through massive logs to build models which deliver relevant search results. Making search better in Catalonia, Estonia, and everywhere else. Mar-29 |
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| Staying safe online. Here are a number of resources we posted this week, including a family safety guide and video. Official Google Blog: A common sense approach to Internet safety. Mar-29 |
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| Kourosh's click fraud talk at CMU. Here's a great video of the 70-minute talk the head of our Ad Traffic Quality engineering team gave at Carnegie Mellon in October. YouTube - Click Fraud: Anecdotes from the Front Line. Mar-29 |
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| I didn't really need 4 RSS feeds. I recently tried Twitter, del.icio.us, and FriendFeed to enable more frequent and granular writing and sharing. I've now stopped using the first two, but am still using FriendFeed. Instead, I've created a new section on my site with my microblog content and included it in my main RSS feed. Mar-28 |
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| Links: Links to this site |
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