'Net Features : click fraud

Win the War Against Mobile Click Fraud

Michael Garrity — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:15:00 GMT

The rise of the mobile Web has been something of a headache for many advertisers and marketers, as it’s presented new problems with analytics and tracking that they must address, as well as re-presenting old concerns that they thought were long overcome.

One such issue is click fraud, which, while still a fringe problem on the Internet, has been mostly kept in check for years now thanks to various software and solutions that offer features created to combat it. Unfortunately, many mobile solutions aren’t as equipped to fight it, and as a result, mobile click fraud has seen a noticeable increase over the last few years. In fact, a recent Trademob study documented 10 million mobile ad clicks across 10 mobile networks and found that 40 percent of them were accidental or fraudulent.

To address this issue, mobile tracking platform iMobiTrax has released a handful of new features aimed at combating click fraud so that mobile-focused marketers and advertisers can improve their return on investment (ROI). It also included new traffic blocking rules, allowing users to set all rules to block, filter, active or inactive; they can even send all of the blocked clicks to a unique URL that they specify.

iMobiTrax lets its customers group and sort their data to immediately see where they are making and losing money, so that they can quickly increase their ROI and turn their focus to the devices, manufacturers, operating systems and ISPs or carriers that are actually helping them bring in money.

The announcement also introduced other new features added to the platform, including separate or multi-domain tracking, split testing options, the ability to track multiple offers, pass tracking tokens, weighted landing page options and the option to rotate both unlimited landing pages and unlimited offers.

Click Fraud Drops But New Malware Scheme Surfaces

Linc Wonham — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:00:00 GMT

The click fraud rate dropped in the fourth quarter of 2010 for the first time since the middle of 2009, according to a new report from Click Forensics.

The rate dipped from 22.3 percent in Q3 2010 to 19.1 percent in Q4, ending a string of five straight quarterly increases that began with the rate at 14.1 percent midway through 2009. Click Forensics uses traffic from more than 300 advertising networks to produce the data.

The news was not all favorable, however, as seen in some of the report's highlights below:

• While the fourth quarter’s overall industry average click fraud rate of 19.1 percent was lower than the reported rate for Q3 2010, it was higher than the 15.3 rate reported for Q4 2009.

• The Click Forensics Malware Lab identified a new malware scheme targeting display banner ads. The sophisticated program performs a pop-up or pop-under and rotates brand advertisers’ banner ads every 10 to 15 minutes in an effort to seemingly boost impression figures. Click Forensics researchers are working diligently to quantify the impact of this new scheme.

• In Q4 2010, the countries outside North America producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Japan, The Netherlands, Philippines, Sweden and France, respectively.

“While the overall click fraud rate dropped last quarter for CPC advertising, we saw the emergence of new schemes focused on display advertisements,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “We are investigating the malware-driven attacks in more detail, but early evidence points to an impression inflation scheme. It’s something we will examine more closely and report on later this year.”

To see the entire report, visit Click Fraud Index.

Is Click Fraud Unstoppable?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:48:00 GMT

Click Forensics has released its audience quality figures for the thrid quarter 2010 and the news remains negative.

The overall industry average click fraud rate according to Click Forensics was 22.3 percent - up from the 18.6 percent reported in the second quarter of 2010 and the 14.1 percent reported in the third quarter of 2009.

The countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the largest volume of click fraud were Japan, The Netherlands, the Phillipines and China.

According to Click Forensics' CEO Paul Pellman, "During the past quarter, we saw a growing volume of click fraud flow through a more diverse number of sources, including mobile proxies. As advertising in videos, social networks and mobile devices continues to grow, advertisers will need to pay close attention to the quality of traffic they receive.”

Click Fraud Climbing; Social ‘Nets Partially Immune

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

The overall click fraud rate is slowly trending higher over the past several quarters according to Click Forensics.

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent. That’s up from the 17.4 percent reported for Q1 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for Q2 2009. In Q2 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China respectively.

“Over the past several quarters, we’ve seen the overall click fraud rate slowly trending higher,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The main reasons appear to be the continued sophistication of botnets and malware prevalent in the fast-growing search marketing space. We advise online marketers to be watchful of their campaigns as they spend more on search advertising in the coming quarters.”

It’s not all bad news however. Click Forensics study of campaigns from a cross-section of advertisers and third-party ad networks showed traffic from leading social networking sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to have an average overall click fraud rate of 11.5 percent, significantly lower than the industry average.

The takeaway from the study might just be that advertising on social networks will lessen the chance of click fraud on your campaigns. While one could probably attribute that to the still relatively low adoption rate of advertising on these destinations, it might also be related to the fact that social networks don't have the affiliate marketers profiting from elicit clicks.

Click Fraud Unchanged (Sort Of)

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:30:00 GMT

Anchor Intelligence released its traffic quality report for Q2 2010 and it appears that the attempted click fraud rate is remaining consistent (sort of).

The average attempted click fraud rate remain relatively unchanged from 29.2% in Q1 2010 to 28.9% in Q2 2010 according to Anchor Intelligence. In comparison to the same quarter last year, the attempted click fraud rate represents an increase of 26% year over year.

Anchor Intelligence attributes the attempted click fraud rate primarily to the dramatic growth in botnet scale and volume around the globe as well as the continued exploitation by malicious hosts of security vulnerabilities in the Internet infrastructure of countries such as Vietnam, Australia, and the US.

“Click fraud attempts are not going to go away any time soon. Cybercriminals will simply reallocate their attempts from well protected ad networks and search engines to those that do not have a fortified line of defense,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “Fraudsters are efficient. Once they stop receiving payments from one set of targets, they’ll simply find another set that is likely to pay out.”

Social Network Click Fraud Low

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:17:00 GMT

A study of advertising campaigns on top social networks by ClickForensics found a click fraud rate of 11.5 percent in Q1 2010 as the overall industry click fraud rate rose to 17.4 percent.

ClickForensics studied online campaigns from a cross-section of advertisers and ad networks and found that click-fraud volume from the leading social networking sites (Facebook, TWitter, MySpace, LinkedIn) was significantly lower than the industry average. In Q1 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were the Philippines, Ukraine and China, respectively.

“While a handful of suspected click fraud schemes on social networking sites have been alleged by individual advertisers, it’s widely assumed that these sites are less vulnerable to click fraud schemes,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The results of our new study corroborate this by tracking a lower overall click fraud rate on social networks than we’ve ever tracked on traditional PPC venues. Conversely, the overall industry rate seems to be creeping higher, so we recommend marketers continue to be watchful of their campaigns.”

One in Four Clicks "Bogus" Says Anchor Intelligence Report

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:15:00 GMT

So what’s up with click fraud these days? A lot and none of it’s good. Anchor Intelligence released its “Traffic Quality Report: 2009 Year in Review" today. The network saw the average attempted click fraud rate jump by nearly 40% from 18.6% in Q3 to 25.7% in Q4.

Some additional highlights from the report include:
- Attempted click fraud increased overall in 2009 as click fraudsters increasingly leveraged botnets to automate high velocity traffic and coordinate traffic from click fraud rings.
- In 2009, the five countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates were Vietnam, U.S., Egypt, Canada, and Australia. In particular, the U.S. and Canada accounted for the vast majority of traffic volume, making these two countries the largest sources of attempted click fraud by volume.

Here are a few highlights related specifically to the fourth quarter:
- The average attempted click fraud rate increased in the fourth quarter of 2009 as a result of greater activity by click fraudsters looking to take advantage of the surge in holiday ad spend online.

- Egypt became the country with the highest attempted click fraud rate (38.7%), followed closely by Australia (38.4%) and the U.S. (29.8%). Attempted click fraud within these countries resulted primarily from a distinct number of IP addresses with automated, high-velocity traffic and large-scale, coordinated click fraud rings.

Over the course of 2009, Anchor claimed to save advertisers more than $35 million by identifying click fraud in real time, before it could impact advertiser spend.

Blame It on the Botnets; Click Fraud Figures, Q3 2009

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Click Forensics today released click fraud figures today for the third quarter, and while the overall rate increase to 14.1 percent in the third quarter of this year (up from 12.7 percent for Q2 2009), it remains lower than the 16.0 percent rate the company reported for the same period last year.

So who or what is causing all the click fraud? You can blame it on the botnets – group of infected PCs that are controlled by malicious software. Click Forensics, an audience verification and traffic quality vendor, said that botnets accounted for 42.6 percent of all click fraud in the quarter, more than doubling in the past two years and up from the 27.5 percent reported for the same quarter last year.

“The significant rise in botnet-generated click fraud lines up with recent findings of several well-known malware and online fraud tracking experts,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “Botnets perpetrating click fraud and other online schemes continue to grow in number and sophistication. Advertisers and ad providers need to be especially vigilant about such activity as we enter the competitive search marketing holiday season.”

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Click Fraud Surge From Bahama Botnet

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:20:00 GMT

ClickForensics just announced that it has identified a large spike in click fraud traffic coming from a new botnet that appears to be eluding the filters of even the most sophisticated search engines, publishers and ad networks.

The real danger here is that the malware distributed botnet (codenamed "Bahama botnet" by Click Forensics) is masking itself as a legitimate high-quality source of search advertising traffic. In some instances, attacks have affected up to 30 percent of an advertisers monthly budget on specific campaigns.

From the release: "The Bahama botnet commits click fraud in a number of different ways. It can generate paid clicks by using normal user behavior to transform an organic search into a paid click. It can also leverage the network of bot-infected machines to programmatically auto-generate paid clicks without any human interaction. The dual nature of this botnet makes it a more powerful vehicle for committing click fraud than other kinds of click fraud botnets."

What will makes this so frightening for advertisers is that the botnet operates intermittently so users don't know anything is wrong, does so independently and is coming from many different IP's making it difficult to find and identify which clicks are indeed fraudulent. ClickForensics did catch these auto-generated clicks through anomaly detection programs.

The botnet appears to be related to the recent scareware attacks such as those perpetrated again the NY Times site this week. A pop-up greeted users when arriving at the site, informing them their computer was infected and directed to a site where they could install an Antivirus program (which was infected with a Trojan).

“During the past four years we’ve monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as ‘good traffic’ by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines.”

Click Fraud; Down, But Not Out

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:40:00 GMT

Anchor Intelligence last week released its first report detailing traffic quality across its network of search engines, ad networks, publishers, and advertisers. The verdict? Click fraud is down (albeit only slightly).

Based on Anchor’s analysis of data from customers, the average invalid rate for Anchor customers fell slightly from 27.9% in Q1 to 27.1% in Q2. The Q1 invalid rate was comprised of a 21.7% average attempted click fraud rate and a 6.2% other invalid rate. In Q2, the average attempted click fraud rate increased to 22.9% and the other invalid rate declined to 4.2%.

In addition to the network-level rates, Anchor Intelligence also reported traffic quality rates for the top 30 countries by traffic volume. The countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates were Vietnam (48.3%), Canada (27.7%), and the U.S. (25.6%). Many lower volume countries experienced much higher attempted click fraud rates.

The Traffic Quality Report from Anchor can be accessed here.

Do these numbers seem a little out of place? The Anchor report is akin to saying that one out of five clicks is fraudulent. That's pretty shocking and I'm probably more cynical than your average PPC marketer. Click Forensics also released data on 2nd quarter PPC fraud figures (citing it as 12.7%) and it’s down for the quarter and the year across their network too. Click fraud remains a threat to every online advertiser but it remains difficult to measure - perhaps the reason for the discrepancy.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some standards in measuring click fraud?
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Ad Agencies Fighting Click Fraud

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:12:00 GMT

No one is immune from the recession. When advertisers cut back by spending less it impacts everyone - even those perpetuating click fraud.

Agencies, whose margins are slim enough as it is, are increasingly aware of the trend and are looking towards solutions to ensure that their piece of ad revenue isn't reduced any more than neccessary. Case in point, media and technology company Burst Media partnered with Anchor Intelligence to enhance its existing inventory auditing systems with "additional visibility" into site traffic quality.

Through Burst’s partnership with Anchor Intelligence, web sites and ad networks utilizing adConductor™, Burst’s ad management and optimization platform, will receive insight into their own and affiliates’ traffic quality. “Our partnership with Anchor Intelligence will contribute to Burst’s ad inventory optimization and traffic filtering programs and allow us to deliver even more value to our advertiser and publisher partners by enhancing our commitment to provide the highest quality traffic sources,” said Harry Klein, COO Burst Media.

Burst joins the ranks of Ask.com, Technorati, LookSmart, Vivaki (Publicis Groupe), and several other industry leaders in partnering with Anchor Intelligence to protect advertisers and improve advertising performance.

Click Fraud; Minimized by Monitoring - Anchor Intelligence

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:45:00 GMT

Despite being a serious threat, click-fraud didn't really diminish the value in and growth of paid search marketing.

That's not to say that click fraud does not remain a major issue for advertisers, networks and publishers. Over time, what has happened is that technologies have surfaced which have worked to minimize the negative impact of fraudulent behavior.

Case in point is traffic quality solution provider Anchor Intelligence's announcement that it is launching the first-ever traffic quality alert capabilities as part of its ClearMark product suite.

ClearMark Alerts provide automated email alerts to customers when the invalid rate for the network or any traffic source reaches an "alarming" level. Not sure what qualifies as "alarming" but you get the idea. These alerts help customers immediately respond to instances of click fraud or other types of invalid traffic across their network.

ClearMark Alerts are sent when traffic quality for a network and/or one of the referrers within that network degrades significantly. Each alert conveys a range of information including the name of the account or referrer in question, the non-billable rates and overall traffic volumes for the period of alarm, as well as the average non-billable and overall traffic volumes for the preceding week as a point of comparison. As a result, customers can quickly understand why the alert was sent and respond accordingly.

“Throughout discussions with potential and current Anchor customers, the need for an alert system to notify customers of major changes in traffic quality became very clear,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “ClearMark Alerts, in combination with the real-time traffic scoring capabilities of the ClearMark system, gives ad network and search engine customers new means to fight click fraud before it impacts advertisers.”

Some big ad networks see the value and have already deployed ClearMark Alerts. "With billions of ad impressions in Technorati's self-serve ad network, it is important to ensure that our advertisers receive the highest quality traffic," said Shani Higgins, VP and GM of Media at Technorati, an early adopter of the alerts system. "Anchor's ClearMark Alerts help us to immediately determine whether incoming traffic is valid or invalid so we can meet our advertisers' needs." Anchor Intelligence provides their services to many well known advertising related companies in addition to Technorati, including AdEngage, LookSmart, Ask, and GenieKnows.

Click-fraud Declines in Q1 2009

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:24:00 GMT

Click Forensics released PPC fraud figures from the first quarter 2009 last week. There is good news for PPC advertisers.

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 13.8 percent for Q1 2009. That’s down from 17.1 percent reported for Q4 2008 and from the 16.3 percent rate reported for Q1 2008. In Q1 2009, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada, United Kingdom and Germany. Tom Cuthbert, president of ClickForensics, attributes the drop to the decrease in keyword CPCs and the progress Yahoo! and Google have made blocking click fraud from botnet sources.

“It appears that the drop in keyword Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) and the progress Yahoo! and Google made blocking click fraud from botnet sources contributed to the decline in the overall click fraud rate this quarter,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “However, we also saw an increase in scripted attacks aimed at ad networks, which are historically more vulnerable to such threats. Advertisers should pay close attention to traffic from these sources over the next year.”

Four Click Fraud Profiles

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Anchor Intelligence released a report entitled "Anatomy of a Fraudster" which describes four profiles of click fraud perpetrators. The traffic quality solution provider studied traffic patterns across its clients base and gathered intelligence on four of the most prevalent fraudulent behavioral profiles, ranging in levels of sophistication. The profiles are summarized as follows:

Click fraud farmers – members of click farms, which are outsourced by an organization and paid to generate clicks on behalf of a third party.
Pyramid schemers – individuals who are caught up in illegal schemes, in which they are paid to click on ads, visit websites and recruit other users.
Money launderers – fraudsters who recruit consumers to use their personal information to register various websites with ad networks with intent to generate false clicks on ads hosted by their websites.
Kit sophisticates – fraudsters who purchase kits online to commit fraud. These kits often serve as a one-stop shop for click fraud perpetrators and provide tools to create hundreds of websites, mass register accounts and generate thousands of fraudulent ad clicks.

“The sophistication levels of these fraudster profiles vary significantly. Advertisers can generally minimize the less sophisticated fraudsters by following the advice of bloggers and industry thought leaders. Unfortunately, more sophisticated forms of fraud, such as the Money Launderers and Kit Sophisticates, are becoming increasingly commonplace. These guys are generally much more difficult to detect and often require the help of a third party,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence.

The “Anatomy of a Fraudster” report is available as a free download to ad networks and members of the online advertising industry

Current Click Fraud Rates

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:15:00 GMT

Click fraud reporting service Click Forensics released its industry pay-per-click fraud figures. The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.0 percent in the third quarter of 2008, down from the 16.2 percent rate reported for both Q2 2008 and Q3 2007.

Other key findings from the report include:

- Average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks (e.g. Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network) was 27.1 percent, down from the 27.6 percent rate reported for Q2 2008 and the 28.1 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q3 2007.

- Traffic from botnets was responsible for 27.6 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q3 2008 - up from 25.2 percent for Q2 2008.

- In Q3 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Russia (4.9 percent), France (4.8 percent) and the U.K. (3.5 percent).