Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Hi Guys

I’ve been hard at work with the Clicks2Customers team and MarketingExperiments, doing click fraud research. I’ve also made a couple of postings regarding click fraud on WebmasterWorld recently.

We have just released a Click Fraud Risk Calculator which can help you assess your PPC Click fraud risk.

In the end, it boiled down the following charts, which will help estimate the RISK of click fraud. This is not definitive and results will vary, but we believe it is a good guideline.

The results are pretty intuitive, bordering on obvious, but I think it’s nice that we get it in one place.

I’m going to run through a quick written analysis, based on the charts.

1. Higher Individual Click Prices lead to higher Click Fraud (CF) risk.
2. Higher Click volumes lead to lower click fraud risk.
3. Higher number of keywords in the terms being bid on lead to lower CF risk.
4. More Active (receiving a click in a given month) keywords lowers CF risk.
5. More distribution partners (content targeting, etc), leads to higher CF risk (Google Adwords offers the ability to negative match content partners - very nice, and this will mitigate risk).
6. More competitors on keywords lead to higher CF risk.
7. Higher AVERAGE click prices lead to high CF risk.
8. More countries being added to your campaign, more CF risk.

Please email me your comments to vlingham@gmail.com - I would love feedback on these charts. Also, feel free to distribute the image above, or link to this blog or the Clicks2Customers Click Fraud page (http://www.clicks2customers.com/click-fraud.asp).

incuBeta has just discovered some new adwords formats being tested. Very interesting, this only occurs with localized listings in the midway position. We can’t figure out what’s causing it yet.

Have a look: