I just read one article from SiteProNews (http://www.sitepronews.com/).

They write great articles, and I would like to comment on this one about Click Fraud.

I recently had one campaign running and I noticed a enormous click fraud on my stats. I made up a system that would track every single click. So I will try to answer some questions on the article:

* How do you define an invalid (i.e., non-billable) clíck?

I did made up a PHP landing page that gets the referer, the user_agent, from (with PPC), and saves this on a database and also create a cookie on the visitor computer. Then, the system redirects this user to a second page, that is the page that has the content, and this second page checks if user were able to store cookie.

My code, you may need to do some adjustments if you plan to use it, I am creating a cookie with an unique ID number so I will be able to see the total "real" visitors from my campaign, and I create the cookie2, that store a unique ID from an specific search engine PPC where I am running the campaign.

" . erro("Erro no SQL", "$sql_str", "email") ."

");

$sql_str2 = "select max(cookie_enable) as maxcookie from nat_stat";
$sql2 = mysql_query($sql_str2) or die ("erro");
$array2 = mysql_fetch_array($sql2);
$maxcookie = $array2[maxcookie] + 1;

$sql_str3 = "select max(cookie_enable2) as maxcookie2 from nat_stat where from_ = '$from'";
$sql3 = mysql_query($sql_str3) or die ("erro");
$array3 = mysql_fetch_array($sql3);
$maxcookie2 = $array3[maxcookie2] + 1;

setcookie("cookie_enable", "$maxcookie",time()+60*60*24*30*356*10);
setcookie("cookie_enable2", "$maxcookie2",time()+60*60*24*30*356*10);

$loc= "Location: http://www.my_real_landing_page.com/_.php?from=" . $from . "&k=" . $k . "&referer=" . $referer . "&ip=" . $ip . "&user_agent=" . $user_agent;
header($loc);
?>


* What is the true size of the clíck fraud problem?

I found out that is big, only one example, from Miva I received one day 550 users, and only 53 had user agent information. On Miva system were showing that I received 450 clicks, and they charged me.

* With all the publishers you have purportedly kicked-out of your publisher networks–and the clíck bots that you claim to stop at your gate–why hasn't there been ANY criminal prosecution of someone for activities related to clíck fraud?

The big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) do not send you all that fraud, they block it. The small ones, I had good experience with Goclick, all the others, the fraud was enormous.


* When you cut off a distribution partner for fraudulent activity, do you retroactively refund questionable ad revenue to all effected advertisers—not just the ones whose complaints generated the inquiry?

I am complaining and I did only receive about 10% of the refund that I should be receiving. I can imagine that who do not complain....



Ricardo Guimaraes
Avatar Interactive

Internet

I spent part of my life (more than 12 years) working exclusively on Internet projects.

I would like to share here some of what I have learned, and I want to keep learning with your posts.

Ricardo