In their first appearance on the dais at a Search Engine Strategies session on click fraud, Yahoo! and Google went head-to-head with search engine marketing firms on the costs and cures for bogus clicks, alleging that lawsuits filed by search marketers alleging losses hurt the cause of eradicating the problem. [For more on this story, see our DirectBuzz blog posts for the SES show.]
Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for Google, maintained that the suits now pending charge search engine respondents with “collusion” and “conspiracy”, thus making it difficult to mount a combined attack against click fraud by sharing their clickstream data with advertisers.
“We’re very supportive of cross-industry efforts to attack this challenge and work together on it,” Ghosemajumder told the audience. “But one complexity is that the lawsuit alleges that the engines are conspiring to do something. I’d love to do more cross-industry stuff, if we didn’t have this sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.”
But Jessie Stricchiola, found of search marketing consultancy Alchemist Media, disputed that view. “We wouldn’t have this litigation problem if things had been addressed from a more advertiser-centric perspective,” she said. “Prior to litigation, we had invited the search engines to have representatives on this panel many times to discuss this issue, but for three years nobody wanted to come up and sit in the hot seat. If anything, I think the litigation has helped increase the accountability on all sides for this issue.”
Both Google and Yahoo!, represented on the panel by director of product management John Slade, said the engines have set up tracking and filtering systems that detect most fraudulent clicks on paid search listings and issue refunds to advertisers to cover those losses. But Stricchiola and Greg Boser, president of search marketing firm WebGuerilla, maintained that to gauge the scope of the problem, the search engines need to share their data with merchants who can track their conversions coming from clicks and uncover suspected fraud.
Click fraud can occur by a competitor trying to drive up an advertiser’s pay-per-click (PPC) costs by clicking through on paid search ads. More commonly, operators set up spam Web sites, join the search engines’ content networks as affiliates, and collect the revenue portion that the engines share with their content publishers.
Boser said the greatest dollar losses come from competitive click fraud in big-money fields such as personal-injury law. But “the volume of total crap Web sites in the [Google] AdSense program is so high it’s ridiculous,” he said. Spammers put up dozens of virtually empty Web sites and register into Google’s AdSense content network, he said, and then click on the PPC ads judiciously enough to go undetected by Google’s filters.
“In my opinion, that’s a huge factor that escalates this whole clicking thing,” he said, adding that he never advised his firm’s clients to place ads on the AdSense network because so many of the clicks are fraudulent that their return on investment (ROI) will be impaired.
Ghosemajumder responded that Google’s AdSense contextual program has provided “outstanding ROI for thousands of advertisers.” He said Google tracks clicks across its distribution network as thoroughly as it watches clicks on the Google-owned sites, and terminates content partners on a daily basis because of those investigations.
Slade said that Yahoo! ejects content partners for a number of infractions including patterns of invalid clicks. “We take our distribution network very seriously,” he said. “We’ve fired partners before for doing things, and we’ll fire them again.”
Google is currently facing two lawsuits for click fraud, brought by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles and Click Defense, a supplier of click fraud auditing tools.
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