This story over at Netimperative is a good read for anyone who wants to grok clickfraud, and it includes a good tick tock of several advertisers’ travails.
Let’s face it, click fraud is bad news for the advertiser, but it’s still pouring millions into search engine bank accounts.
So, is it feasible that they really would want to put such a concerted effort into something, which effectively, helps them make less money?
In Jake’s case, he presented them with refined data which he’d pulled together himself. Once Google had analysed the data, they got back to him (within five days) and agreed that it was fraudulent activity and agreed to a refund.
I have to say, in my further conversations with both Jessie and Jake, we were all agreed that, as Jake put it “there’s an insane number of PPC advertisers who don’t bother tracking. They don’t bother using unique URLs for monitoring and ROI purposes.”
The Onion ran a gag on Google’s next acquisition: http://theonion.com/infograph/index.php?issue=4105
Seems we need a whole category — no, a whole site — dedicated to predicting where Google will search next.
There is a business to be built here, auditing logs and claiming back the refunds for advertisers. The search engines will co-operate because it gives them a perfect excuse not to police click fraud themselves, and they can continue to make a fortune off the advertisers who don’t bother…
All of them profiled
http://adsense-scammers.blogspot.com/
The url listed for the story is acting weird.
What would happen when that random “billionaer” would split the 100 Million Dollars into 100 single pieces? The amount of 1 Million is still attractive. And bringing google a hundred times in trouble would be more effective than shooting trouble on them only one time.