Overture Fraud Clicking

[stewart_pittman]

This is very disturbing. I was telling my computer buddy about how I use Overture and we discussed it. I was mentioning the benfits of Overture and he was debating me the drawbacks and that is why I am compelled to write to as many forums as possible.

Just recently, i went to his house. He said looka t my computer. It was shut off. He turned it on. I watched it log into AOL automatically then I saw a program called EZ Macro load up. The macro program opened up a browser and then a text file opened up with a bunch of links. The program cut and pasted the links to a browser and the browser went to the link. The link was an overture link.

The macro program closed down, aol closed down, the computer rebooted and the cycle repeated.

He was able to show me how he clicked and made overture clients waste money. And he used mortgage compaines who are bidding for loan keywords and all he kept saying, "That's $5 dollars they wasted."

And then he showed me how the macro program moved the mouse and clicked links by itself.

How the hell does Overture prevent this??????
He told me he rebooted his computer, so he can get a differnt ip address.

ughh, I am so pissed.

-freddie
freddie_asontv @ hotmail.com

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums freddie! :hi:

Welcome to the world of PPC scams and fraud. It's rampant. It will never go away. It's the cost of doing business the PPC way.

NO SE can EVER de-fraud Fraud. It will always exist.

Overture is VERY good at the "spin". Stop listening to their spin and simply make sure you are getting enough money to run campaigns while taking into account the fraud and wasted money your site and client sites have to endure.

[UB1]

Though there is no data to substantiate - still I have a feeling that some "not so noble setups" are running click squads to generate random clicks to bleed a site.

My overture performance is down to abysmal numbers.

It has become essential for me to micro-manage my PPC SE campaigns - manually. This is a hugely time consuming but an unavoidable task.

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums UB1! :hi:

Not to mention the fact that Overture is bed buddies with scumware and might be a reason ROI is waaaay down with them.

[UB1]

Thanks ihelpyou.

You donot seem to be very pleased withe Overture(-:

[ihelpyou]

Nope.

I would never recommend them to clients. I tell clients that their 'paid' ads will show up on Gator.com popups, so if they are comfortable with being associated with scumware..... then go for it. I'm not comfortable with that but obviously, many website owners and SEM's are comfortable with the association with scum.

[bigDugan]

Hmmm...

Having your 'puter reboot everytime between links, does seem to be quite the waste. All you need is a high traffic site and the meta tag 'refresh' command and you've got yourself a poor man's nickel clicker. You can even throw in a hidden frame or two if you want. NO REBOOTS REQUIRED. Every IP address will be as different as your user base is!

oh, yeh-- and throw in 4 of them mud flaps with the naked ladies on them....Grrrrrrrrrrrrr....Momma Seita.... it's all good.

[only1f]

Anyone ever try there guys?

http://www.whosclickingwho.com

[Papadoc]

Originally posted by only1f
Anyone ever try there guys?

http://www.whosclickingwho.com

Same 'ol Same 'ol as far as I can see. They even list their methods and frankly, nothing there that is all that impressive if someone is after your hiney and has the slightest idea of what they are doing. Add to this a monetary incentive to hide their activities (to either drive up the competition cost or to actually gain with Adsense), and I still don't see how this tracks anyone except the naive.

IP Address
Unique Identifier String
User Location
User Agents
Transaction Date & Time
PPC Search Engine
Keywords used

There are so many get-arounds here and I thought about mentioning them. But then considered that would be irresponsible and only feed some passerby that is out looking to get some ideas.

Again, I could be wrong here but I would suspect you have to have proof, not just a possiblitity of fraud if you are looking for a refund. They already have your money and aren't likely to part with it unless the fraud is obvious. And if you go away and cancel? To them this is far cheaper than lowering the standard of proof as this would potentially affect every account. They would have a nightmare if word got around that you could go to Overture every month and point out stats that don't seem normal.

I ran into a situation where this happened to a client of mine and the timing of one particular site picking up Adsense and the sudden drain on their account is too close to being a coincidence. The only response that we've gotten from anyone is that they have checked all click IPs against login IP to account holders and there is no correlation. DUH!

Then I ran into a fellow at a local networking event who was bragging about doing this to his competition. He picked up Adsense on his site and let the competitor URL show. But then by using these get-arounds, he'd been making over $4K per month for the last several months, the vast majority of it coming from his competitors. The only thing he was worried about was that he thought his PPC for the site was generally too high at about 9%. He'd also be giving them the double whammy by going over to Overture and doing the same thing there.

Now the ONLY way that I think you could beef up your argument (but it still wouldn't hold much water) and the way we pretty much determined click-fraud, is that about 95% of the click traffic never went past the landing page. To me, that was a pretty good indication. Conversely, the argument could be made (and it has been) that perhaps there isn't enough on the landing page to make visitors want to go any farther.

In my mind, catching these perps isn't a whole lot more likely than catching criminals in the real world. The laws are there... but generally the only ones that are caught are those that don't don't have the first clue and think they cannot be tracked, acted without thinking it all through, or just friggin unlucky.

[jbrandt]

any suggestions on how to lower click fraud?

[Hope]

stay out of a competative market??

there is not way to prevent or reduce fraud. Your competition could be dirty enough to use this to remove your budget and get you out of the PPC listings. This will put them ahead of you and they won't have to bid more. It is a nasty business, but then again, with all the spammers out there, we shouldn't be surprised about this crap either.

[Ronnan]

You can stop, or at least limit, click through fraud by using CountryCheck.com

They offer free asp and php scripts on their site and by allowing you to track how many click throughs come from anonymous proxies you have proof to take back to your ppc supplier in the event of a dispute.

You can test it out by using an anonymous proxy and simply going to their site. It will state in your ip details: "using anonymous proxy".

I also read that they are doing a click through fraud study. You might be able to assist with that and save some $$$.

[Webmaster T]

Great if the guy is dumb enough to use an anonymous proxy. Look at the first post he's doing it on AOL which when he restarts the computer that gives him a fresh IP. MSN, earthlink, and any number of the free ISP's could be used in conjunction with AOL to totally make the IP from a diferent block each time. Nope if you're doing PPC then click fraud is a cost of doing business, period, you're fooling yourself if you think you can stop the determined fraudster.

[JuniorHarris]

Please explain how it is exactly that "program" can be used to stop/limit click through fraud, as I fail to see any benefit.

From what I see, all it will reveal is if the source IP address is a proxy. That in itself does not signify a fraudulent click...

Looks like a drive by link drop to me...:eyes:

[Ronnan]

Hi JuniorHarris,

What CountryCheck.com will show is that the click came through an open proxy. AOL and the others mentioned are all still closed proxies even if their actual ip address changes, no one other than the person with that ip can use that address.

Most click through fraud comes from outside the USA. With advertising programs like Google you can specify where you want to advertise. If you say "only show to surfers in the USA" you can potentially cut down on click through fraud if you had some way of stopping people using open proxies from outside the USA clicking on your ads.

This is where CC helps. You can see how many of your click throughs are from "open" proxies and avoid the foreign click fraudsters who are the ones that cause the most problems.

Not sure if you agree with me, but I have found them useful.

Ronnan

[bigDugan]

Please stick your sig where it belongs... in your sig file.
Yes, I'd say it looks like a drive-by too. :(

I dont believe the open proxies are the main source of PPC fraud. The real problem is the nickel clickers.

Nickel clickers are VERY EASY to setup. All you need to do is setup a frameset page, and use the meta tag REFRESH in one of your frames to have the visitor automagically click on the target link.

I have a site with over 200,000 daily user sessions. Can you imagine what that could do?

The only way to STOP ppc fraud... is NOT use PPC.

IMHO, there is no way they can control the "nickel clickers"-- as the clicks all come from different ip addresses and appear to be genuine. These "clicks" are NO different than if the user had intended to click on it themselves. Unless they are calling every user that clicks on every link and asking them, I'd say it would be very hard for them to distinguish the "real" clicks from the bogus clicks.

[JuniorHarris]

There may be a few that use open proxies, but as suggested those can easily be filtered and flagged based upon proxy ip. But experts could employ a more technically advanced [scripted] version of the nikkel klicker, that unless there was access to the source, would be virtually impossible to detect!~

[bigDugan]

Right. Why would I even bother with an open proxy if I was using a "nikkel klicker"? There would be no reason to. All the IPs would already be from different legitimate IP addresses. Open proxies are very easy to blacklist. With a nikkel klicker you have legitimate users unknowing clicking on your PPC affiliate links. It's no different that if the user had clicked on the link themselves. Virtually impossible to track this type of fraud. :eek: The same principal is behind a lot of the spam worms. Believe me. I've been on both sides of the nikkel clicker. :( If you've seen what I've seen.. :rolleyes:

[Crichey]

The only way I can see to stop that would be to have the PPC provider not charge for a visitor that isn't on your site for less than 10 seconds. As to how they could do that....

I had no idea that Overture ads would appear on gator.com That in itself is reason to NEVER use them. Gator is a @#$%^ One of the worst wasters of computing time/bandwidth out there IMHO.

Great post by the way.
:cheers: