Pay –per-click advertising is big money business and constitutes a big percentage of revenue stream for the internet’s major advertising providers. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft provide the ideal platforms for advertising on the web with targeted advertising, the likes of which you can’t get anywhere else. However, as with any major industry, there’s always someone waiting in the wings to scam it. Here we look at how Microsoft are dealing with recent fraud methods and who’s often behind these scams.
Microsoft have recently taken up a lawsuit against the president of RedOrbit Inc for Click laundering, as well as other suits involving an array of individuals involved in similar kinds of scams. This kind of fraud hits the advertisers in the pocket, and Microsoft is of course keen to maintain the integrity of their advertising platform AdCenter. Despite click fraud being an ongoing issue for Advertisers, this case took centre stage due to the unique nature of the scam.
In many cases, fraudsters simply use botnets (a collection of software agents or robots) and parked sites to direct clicks to onsite adverts. However RedOrbit apparently directed the traffic to its own servers, where it scraped out the traffic referring information and replaced it with code which made it appear that traffic had come directly to the approved RedOrbit site. As a result all advert clicks appeared genuine.
Microsoft stated that they first noticed the potential fraud back in 2009 when hits from RedOrbit went from a daily average of 75 a day to 10,000 a day. Microsoft’s top priority from there was to set up some countermeasures to tackle this kind of fraud. With measures now in place, Microsoft are confident of security but are tight lipped about the details due to fears that others will use the info to get around it.
So who are These PPC Fraudsters?
Obviously with any crime, it’s all about who stands to lose and who stands to gain. Publishing adverts on your site in conjunction with an advertising network such as AdCenter means that you can turn a profit from clicks on adverts on your site. Advertisers of course get the benefit of potentially increasing revenues and traffic due to paying for these adverts, and advertising networks stand to gain as the provider of these services.
As the provider of the service, networks are responsible for the integrity of the platform. Hence Microsoft’s array of lawsuits. Doesn't that make the culprit either the advertiser or the publisher ?
Publishers
Publishers may wish to do this purely for the reason that they can gain greater profit from it. Hence the variety of techniques such as botnets, click laundering and link sites. However, they are usually the first suspect as a result of this and it is generally quite easy for networks to trace it back to them. This is why the RedOrbit suit has become such a major issue for Microsoft due to the way it got around direct detection.
Advertisers
Advertisers certainly wouldn't be clicking on their own adverts as that would cost them, so this leaves only their competitors. Although these perpetrators do not profit directly from the act, they act purely to harm competitors by driving up their PPC charges. As a result they can weaken their competition online.
Others
It’s more common than you might think for fraudulent clicks to come from outside the loop. These are the hardest to trace as they do not usually come from anyone affiliated with the advertising system. Malicious intent is the most common, usually directed against an industry or specific publisher, they are often personal or politically motivated. With this method it is often very difficult to track the perpetrator and even if they can, little legal action can be taken.
The final method is not so much malicious, as naive. Friends of a publisher, aware of their revenue stream, will often use clicks with no intention of buying, purely to generate a bit of revenue for their friend. Unfortunately in this case, publishers themselves can be struck off of advertising networks irrelevant of their knowledge of what's going on.
Despite this array of fraud going on, advertising networks are usually extremely effective, and as the advertisers are such major internet players they have the capacity to protect against most methods. Of course, if they want to maintain the trust of advertisers they will certainly have to maintain the integrity of their respective services.
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