It's worthwhile to examine Google's definition of Google AdSense and Click Fraud, before delving deeper into AdSense Fraud.
It's worthwhile to examine Google's definition of Google AdSense and Click Fraud, before delving deeper into AdSense Fraud.
Google AdSense fraud is one of the diseases that plague the Ad Words advertisers. The AdSense program essentially allows website publishers/owners to sign up with Google, enabling them to display Google Ads on their sites. These publishers essentially act as Google Partners. The ads chosen by the Google bot for display are contextual and the ads are related to the contents of the publisher's website, more specifically that particular web page. The intent for Google is to capitalize on the traffic to these (in practice) niche sites and provide highly direct targeted traffic to the advertiser. A subset of the users of the Google Partner website, click on those ads and Google charges the advertiser per click. Google shares the booty with the website publisher but the revenue sharing ratio falls under Google's “undisclosed criteria. While the exact amount can be reverse engineered, the take home lesson is that the final amount is proportional to Google's income from that click.
This category of fraudsters deserves a taxonomy of its own, which we have developed. In the interest of not being gender biased, we have alternated between genders. We hope that our lighthearted tone does not mask the revulsion that we feel towards these cheats.
Regressive Fraudster
This guy is at the bottom of the food chain. Inspired by the riches of his neighbor Ms. Jones, who has been making more than ten grand a month in AdSense revenue, he plans a course of action. He invests in a clickbot software( a simple google search reveals many) and gets a list of anonymous proxy addresses. He then goes to register a few domains and hires someone off of elance to create a network of sites and click both . He hopes that the interlinked sites will provide each some link popularity and increase his page rank. If only it were that simple! He then proceeds to use the $30 clickbot to start clicking on the sites. Or he could click on them himself manually using the proxies. We don't call him click monkey for nothing. He clicks and clicks all the way to see his account getting banned. No banana for this monkey! His calls of despair to google fall on deaf ears. This person is likely to quit, but sometimes retries to get up the food chain, the Wanna -Be-Fraudster.
Wanna -Be Fraudster ( aka BOZO):
This girl searches for high paying keywords like home loan equity (current ad words rate: $45), or web hosting (ad words costing $20). She correctly guesses that the AdSense payout is proportional to what Google earns and therefore homes in on such words. Her strategy is to make a page with contents that are appropriate for the targeted high payout keyword. She moves ahead by clicking on the link multiple times and recruits friends and family to give them a click. Or ten!
Little does she know that Google has a 45 day inspection period before she get her nubby little fingers on that cash. With little to no knowledge of Click through Ratio , her greed couples with her ignorance. Seeing her ill-gotten paper wealth multiplying in her AdSense interface, she increases the clicks. Google however inspects the CTR and throws a fit when they see a CTR exceeding 20%. Furthermore, Google notices clicks mostly originating from a few IP addresses and that essentially seals her fate (or rather docks her earnings). That virtual cash is now just some deleted bytes on a hard disk on Google's servers. She moans, nay she rail against the cruelty of Google's policy. Some of these people wisely cease and desist such activities, perhaps philosophizing about the NFL (no free lunch) theorem. Others however see it as ground school for the next stage of nefarious behavior. The Almost-There Fraudster.
Almost-There Fraudster
The archetypical ATF is supremely confident in his ability to fool Google. Like the BOZO, he looks for high paying keywords and makes appropriate website(s). Let's assume that he is in a third world country, just to make the case more interesting. The case described here is 1 year old news. He has read this article and taken the learnt the subsequent lesson . He knows that that the clicks from the IP Addresses of USA, UK & Canada are worth much more than the clicks from the IP Addresses from the third world countries. He therefore seeks to befriend people from such IP addresses by logging onto messenger services.
This way, he gets the unique, unrelated IP clicks and (he hopes) that Google is fooled. Remember “creature of the night. Well, these people typically are more than a few time zone removed from the US or Canada and therefore are up at odd hours whenever they feel that their targets are most likely to be active. Plus they sometimes have to deal with “inconveniences” like a day job. |
