Contextual advertising isn’t something I follow as closely as I could, I admit. However, this article from Google definitely caught my attention. I’ve been aware of Google’s click fraud policies for quite some time, in a general sense. That is, I knew that they didn’t want advertisers to have to pay just because some jerk who didn’t like your company maliciously tried to inflate your advertising bills. I’ve never known much, however, about how they dealt with this or how it worked.
However, the article draws your attention not only to the relatively obvious source of information, but to a very recent question and answer post from the official AdWords blog. The post provides a lot of great information about just what click fraud is and how it works.
Of course, they don’t share a lot of details about their technology. This is probably for the best, since there are certainly people about who would immediately find ways to thwart their detection system. However, it does give us alot of general purpose information about their techniques and an impression of their concern.
In general, they sound dedicated to the issue, to me. The post on the main Google blog is all about the impending resolution to a lawsuit concerning their click fraud policies and it seems that this law suit has resulted in continuing refinement and analysis of the issues.
This will be nice for advertisers.
My opinion is that also the publishers must have a program like this to protect their accounts againt fraud.
Comment by alex — March 10, 2006 @ 4:00 am
That’s a good point - Google shouldn’t be left to take the entire burden for themselves. The publishers should track their own click-throughs for their own protection, as well!
Comment by Joe Dolson — March 10, 2006 @ 5:28 am