Latest Report on Click Fraud

Google does have countless features, and it's not even considering to stop rolling new ones, but the secret to its huge market capitalization and revenue stream remains its advertising model fully utilizing the Long tail's concept. Therefore, click fraud remains the key issue to deal with, if they want to continue beating Wall Street's expectations. Last week Google released a commissioned report evaluating their anti click fraud methods, here's an excerpt on the four lines of defense :

"Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages."

Despite Eric Schmidt's comments on click fraud as "self correcting" issue, Mark Cuban takes another perspective I find a very relevant one.The key remains the balance between Google's technologies and efforts to build awareness on the problem, very informative report. Pay-per-click is a powerful model forwarding the responsibility for eventual transactions to the advertiser's value added propostion, as compared to a Pay per action model. I doubt Google would have ever reached a stock split debate in its history if it were to use one.

Moreover, with the growing interest in a Pay-per-call model and the rise in voice phishing, it turns the trend into a hot one to keep an eye on for the upcoming future.