…for and from the curious

Another way of click fraud

March 29th, 2006 | by Klaus Holzapfel |

Here is my thing with PPC. The system invites people to cheat. There is money involved with every click, sometimes a few pennies, sometimes as much as $80 per click.

We all know about the classic click fraud behaviors:

1. Hurt your competitors and empty their pockets:
Clicking on a competitor’s link with the goal to charge his bill and eventually max out its daily limit. You will then have the top listing for the rest of the day.

2. Fill your own pockets with contextual advertising:
Placing Google ads on your page and have everyone and their mother click on these links. The only goal is to make money by sharing revenue with Google. None of the advertisers receives any valuable traffic.

But here is another way I haven’t thought about yet:

Manipulating clickthrough rates
Google ranks its PPC ads not just by the highest bidder but also by its clickthrough rate. It measures how effective an ad is and checks how many people actually click on an ad when they see it. Ads with higher clickthrough rates (but lower bids for the relevant keyword) will be displayed even when someone else bids more but his clickthrough rate is very low.

Here is the trick: Someone could perform a ton of queries for a particular keyword and always see the same ads without ever clicking on them. This will manipulate the clickthrough rate and might bring a benefit to the potential black hat advertiser who is targeting just this particular keyword.

Since so much money is at stake in the whole PPC game, some people will already have the next tricks in mind that I can’t even think of. All I know is that I rather bet on a boxing fight and believe it is not fixed…