Combating Chinese Click Fraud

If you're following the latest news, there's a good chance that you came across the BusinessWeek story on click fraud in the current issue. I've been involved in a battle of my own on this issue that runs beyond the scope of their article, so I thought I'd share the story.

We started looking at our server logs after a quarterly report showed around 12% of our traffic was coming from China. We don't sell our products in China, and we've only had a couple of orders sourced from that part of the world. I knew it was fraud as soon as I saw the numbers.

The traffic was coming from a handful of sites, listed here so that you can see if they're showing up on your own servers:

http://aries-search.com/index.php
http://buddah-search.com/index.php
http://800-search.com/index.php
http://www.hit2seek.com/
http://www.agafra.com/

If you look at these sites, on most of them you'll see the same text: "80% bid, $5 payout," which should be your cue that you're dealing with fraud. Here's how they work: These "search engines" are actually scraping content from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. They sign people up to sit and click links all day, then give the clickers a portion of the revenue generated from the clickthroughs--in the case above, 80% of the payout on the clickthrough (if you're unfortunate enough to wind up on these sites, you'll see the value of the click to the clicker) up to $5.

Imagine an Internet cafe filled with people clicking away on your ads to make a few pennies. That's what you're up against.

Since I was batting a thousand on instinct, I decided to blame Google AdWords. They've had problems in the past, the search terms that were coming up had been pulled from Boohoo Search Marketing, and the traffic was out of line with our daily bill from MSN.

That decision lowered my instinct average to .500. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that Google could not be the culprit. We've taken steps to prevent this from happening, including limiting our ads to the United States and opting out of the Content Network. I sent Google an apology after I heard back from them, one that I'll reiterate here. It wasn't Google--they've done right by us so far.

I did a little research based on the landing pages the fraudsters were seeing. As it turned out, all of the fraudulent clicks were coming from two second-tier advertising networks that I'd forgotten about--ePilot and Miva. I suspended our accounts with both providers, and sent an e-mail explaining the situation to ePilot, but I haven't heard anything back from them. I'll assume that's because they're busy finding ways to stop these fraudulent clicks.

What tipped me off was the ads that were appearing on these click fraud engines. I always vary the copy from ad to ad, partly to A/B test, and partly so I know where the traffic is coming from.

With the accounts disabled, the fraudulent Chinese traffic disappeared. I'm still keeping an eye out for it, but so far we're clear. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but anyone in small business knows that a penny lost to fraud is a penny better spent on promotion.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following Five Tips for Combating Click Fraud:

1. Avoid second-tier advertising networks. Stick with the Big Three.
2. Opt out of international placements and content-network placements in your campaigns. If you can't do this (Boohoo Search Marketing, I'm looking at you) then carefully consider your ad spend.
3. Vary text between different PPC providers, so you can track sources.
4. Watch your server logs for suspect traffic.
5. Immediately suspend any account that generates suspect traffic. Print a copy of the server log and keep it in case you need to file a claim for a refund.