Diary of an Online Marketer

A recent WebProNews article detailed a diabolical new fraud scheme. Essentially,

spyware on a user’s PC monitors the user’s browsing to determine the user’s likely purchase intent. Then the spyware fakes a click on a Google PPC ad promoting the exact merchant the user was already visiting. If the user proceeds to make a purchase — reasonably likely for a user already intentionally requesting the merchant’s site — the merchant will naturally credit Google for the sale. Furthermore, a standard ad optimization strategy will lead the merchant to increase its Google PPC bid for this keyword on the reasonable (albeit mistaken) view that Google is successfully finding new customers. But in fact Google and its partners are merely taking credit for customers the merchant had already reached by other methods.

Of course, click fraud is nothing new. But PPC customers should be aware that ever more sophisticated schemes are being hatched all the time. Google is not directly implicated here, of course - in fact they are at pains to point out that they perform their own monitoring for click fraud and pay out refunds to their customers - but many people are advertising via 3rd parties who implement their AdWords campaigns, and it is in their interest to show good results. These are the folks to watch out for.

Filed under: SEM