Google Exec Says Media Exaggerate Click Fraud
Media coverage of click fraud has greatly exaggerated the problem and promoted misconceptions, a Google engineer said Thurs. The industry is developing standards on click- based ads, but advertisers need to take more responsibility and not rely so much on search engines, said Google product management team member Shuman Ghosemajumder.
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Stories of “click farms” in India are “interesting to write about… but don’t necessarily reflect the extent of the problem,” Ghosemajumder said, speaking on a panel at the eComXpo online conference. Even insiders fall victim to misconceptions, he said: “Many less sophisticated advertisers don’t understand” what click fraud really is. Google -- which dedicates “significant resources” to combating click fraud -- “sees the entire gamut” of click- fraud scams. But most often, companies’ competitors or their own affiliates try to register false clicks, he said.
Confusion surrounds the very terminology, Ghosemajumder said: At Google, the term “'invalid click’ simply means the advertiser isn’t being charged. We don’t charge for double clicks or clicks registered by a crawler,” he said. And the search engine deletes and filters out “the vast majority” of fraudulent clicks, he said.
But Click Forensics Pres. Tom Cuthbert didn’t believe it: “Google simply cannot and does not catch all fraudulent clicks.”
Google developed a tool that lets advertisers see the exact number of clicks the company filters out, Ghosemajumder said: It provides “transparency into the protection that Google is already providing them.” But advertisers themselves need to take more responsibility for sniffing out this type of fraud, he said: “It’s not enough that advertisers simply have confidence in our technologies and our abilities to deal with it.”
Gary Kibel of Davis & Gilbert agreed: “On the legal side, it’s really what’s in the contract. A smart [ad agency or advertiser] would say in their agreement, ‘we're not going to be liable for acts of 3rd parties… or for acts beyond our control.'”
The Interactive Ad Bureau’s (IAB) click-fraud measurement group (WID Aug 3 p8) is working on a much-needed “scientific auditing process” to examine search engine click data and “ensure that search engines are doing what they say they are doing,” Ghosemajumder said. It will also pressure other search engines and companies to invest in the proper technology, he said.
Eventually “the same type of standards… that exist in media,” like Nielsen and Arbitron, “will be enforced in cyberspace,” Cuthbert said: The industry needs to work “to put those things in place.”
It’s difficult to have open conversations about click fraud because “if you provide too much information to fraudsters, they can reverse engineer your methods,” Ghosemajumder said. As false clickers learn new methods, “what can we talk about publicly without arming the bad guys?” Kibel asked.
Specific click-fraud legislation could raise awareness among prosecutors and suggest “specific remedies,” Kibel said, “but you don’t need an entirely new law to go after someone doing something fraudulent… and you never know where lawmakers are going to take things.” In the end, whether it’s electronic or not, “it’s still just fraud. We'll have new types of fraud issues and we'll just have to combat those when they arrive.”