CLICK-FRAUD TROUBLES HAVE given industrywide prominence to a handful of small search marketers unaccustomed to the spotlight: Lane's Gifts & Collectibles, Web hosting service AIT, Crafts by Veronica and Metrodate.com. All are relative Davids who have taken on the search engine Goliaths over sub-par clicks for which they believe they were not rightfully compensated.
Add another name to the list of the publicly aggrieved: Radiator.com, an auto-supply Web site owned by 1-800-Radiator, based in Benicia, CA. Radiator.com was first written up in a May Associated Press story on the persistence of Google's click-fraud problems. John Thys, the company's Internet marketing director, says his phone started ringing off the hook immediately with calls from fellow advertisers suspicious of fraud.
“I started hearing from all these small to medium-sized guys all around the country who were just in a state of confusion about what Google is really doing about click fraud,” he says. “They all had the same story we had: They'd submitted data to Google about possible click fraud and hadn't gotten any kind of satisfactory response.”
Radiator.com is the Web offshoot of an auto-radiator wholesaler, Radiator Express Warehouse, that Thys says has been in business for more than 20 years. The company's main focus is still wholesale distribution, but in 2001 it started servicing the do-it-yourself car care market. The company put up a small Web site and shortly after that began running pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google.
“[Google] actually wrote up a case study about us,” Thys says. “They saw this small company start out spending $1,000 a month on search marketing and then grow that budget to $15,000 or $20,000 a month very quickly. So they wrote a study about how this small-to-medium company was expanding sales using their PPC program.”
That, Thys says, makes it all the harder to understand the cavalier treatment Radiator.com received earlier this year when Thys found what he believes are fraudulent clicks.
While cutting back on unproductive keywords, Thys was approached by a San Francisco click-audit company, Click Facts, with an offer to beta test their services. Thys agreed, and Click Facts went back and looked at the company's PPC clicks for February, during which the company spent $20,000 on search ads. Click Facts reported the results to Thys: Thirty-five percent of the company's Google clicks were fraudulent in that month, as were 17% of its clicks on Yahoo!
Thys reported those findings to Google. The result was a boilerplate e-mail message from Google's quality enforcement team informing him that the company had caught those bogus clicks before he was charged for them, and therefore that he had no fraud credits coming. The message contained no itemized details about the clicks Thys had found suspect. “They simply said, ‘Thanks for the data, and by the way, our algorithms are smarter than you, and we've determined these clicks were filtered out already.’”
To add insult to injury, the e-mail was signed simply “Ray.” “No last name, no phone number, no e-mail address,” Thys says. “To me, that was insulting. We were spending upward of $20,000 a month with Google almost since they started selling PPC ads. We followed their reporting procedure. Getting that kind of result didn't sit too well with me.”
Thys pressed the issue and Google agreed to make a more detailed report on a small slice of the data. The results of that second look left him just as dissatisfied. “In some cases, they said we claimed seven cases of click fraud but they only charged us for five,” he says. “Other instances that they say ‘fall within the parameters of normal click behavior’ are just ridiculous, like seeing four clicks from the same IP address in the space of two minutes.”
Whether such patterns could be “normal click behavior” or not doesn't matter to Thys. “I'm paying for leads, which are one click from one IP address,” he says. “So I have to start asking myself what I'm paying for with Google.”
Radiator.com will opt out of that $90 million settlement Google has offered in a click-fraud class-action suit brought in Arkansas. “It's a joke,” Thys says. “There's no way we'll accept that.” Under Google's proposal, only $60 million of that amount will go to PPC advertisers, and that will come in credits that one lawyer in a Google lawsuit has estimated at $4.50 for every $1,000 an advertiser spent.
“I'm starting to get the feeling that their entire system is built on maxing out advertisers' ROI,” he says. “I get that it's their game and they have the power. But they're not open; we simply have to abide by what they tell us are ‘normal’ patterns. It's their rules, and we're all playing by them.”
