Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Google Defends Against Click-Fraud Reports

John Battelle reports that Google has released a PDF discussing “How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports”. From the paper:

Google has detected pervasive reproducible problems in the way third-party click fraud auditing firms gather and report their data. These problems cause their reports to contain fictitious clicks – clicks which were never made on Google AdWords ads. Because of these fictitious clicks, third-party click fraud auditing firms significantly overestimate the number of clicks occurring on an advertiser’s account – and even more significantly overestimate the amount of “click fraud” detected.

Then again, no matter what a company tells us about their software, a security hole by definition is always the piece of software the company didn’t think about. While Google may have a point in showing other reports’ errors, they can’t be sure their own fraud detection methods are fail-safe.

Google Defends Against Cl ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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