Internet Abuse du Jour: Click Abuse
Category: Internet...
Posted Wednesday, April 06, 2005 at 08:49 AM [GMT-6]

An article in today's Wall Street Journal explores the seamy world of "click abuse," the practice of generating "insincere" clicks on competitors' search engine ads in order to drive up their costs.

If you're not familiar with those search engine ads, here's a quick primer. When you use a word or phrase in a search engine like Google, the results page generally contains one or more small text ads set apart from the normal list of websites that match the search term. The advertisers have agreed to pay the search engine each time someone clicks on their ads. The amount of the payment could be as little as 1 cent per click or as high as $100 or more, depending on the popularity of the search term(s) to which the ad is tied. Advertisers often compete with one another to bid up the "click-through price" for those terms, in an effort to make sure that their ad is at the top of the list.

These search engine-delivered ads have become big business. The WSJ article estimates that search companies earned $4 billion in the US last year from such ads. But, as with most things nowadays, anything worth using is worth abusing, and it hasn't taken long for unscrupulous companies and individuals to find a way to scam the system.

They do so by generating large volumes of clicks on their competitors' ads. Often, these clicks are generated by computer, just as most email spam is computer-generated, with little or no human intervention other than hitting the "go" button. The problem has gotten severe enough as to cause advertisers to question the credibility of the entire concept, and some are scaling back or eliminating search ads in their marketing budgets.

Search engines are attempting to fight back, of course. Because search companies like Google don't charge the user, advertising revenue is crucial to their financial success. It's critical that they are able to police the system to ensure its reliability and credibility. They've developed elaborate (and proprietary) algorithms to monitor clicks on search ads, looking for telltale patterns that might indicate the abuse described above. It's not unheard of for them to give advertisers refunds based on their findings.

Click abuse has also spawned a new cottage industry in the form of companies who provide search ad monitoring to advertisers, essentially duplicating what the search companies say they're doing. Among the services they offer is the monitoring and reporting of "suspicious clicks," complete with originating IP address, number of times each IP address clicked on the ad, how long they spent on the client's website and whether any sales resulted from the visit. They'll also tell you which browser and operating system was used by the clicker. (Of course, some of this data can be easily spoofed...and I'm not sure what value things like browser type provides, other than as further evidence in a lawsuit.)

A Google search this morning on the phrase "click abuse" returned 221,000 entries, along with fourteen "Adwords" ads, Google's term for search ads. (The obvious question is whether the owners of those ads are ever victimize by click abuse!) According to Google's Adwords Wizard, those advertisers are paying up to $36 per click to display their pitches, with an average cost per click of just over $10.

A mirror-image form of this abuse, perhaps more benign on the surface but still technically improper, is the intentional "insincere" clicking on ads appearing on websites such as blogs, where the website owner has agreed to lease out space on his or her site for advertising in return for a certain amount per click on those ads. It's not uncommon to see bloggers ask visitors to click on their ads. There's nothing explictly wrong with that request, except that the actual result may be that people are doing so only as a favor to the blogger, and the advertiser is paying the price.

Technorati tag: Search Ad Abuse