Google’s Click Fraud Protection . . . . Woof

By Ian Magwire

So what do you do when you become a victim of click fraud?  Call the cops?  You call Google.  Who profits from click fraud?  Google.  Conflict of interest much?  I’ve read the Tuzhilin report, and I’ve never heard of someone with such credentials use the word “reasonable” as an excuse for a conclusion so often or so egregiously.

In a nutshell: Google makes a profit from click fraud, so their system of filters designed to prevent click fraud stay about as up to date as Google wants them to.  Google refuses to give over any details about, or the identity of, those who commit click fraud for fear of piracy.

Piracy in this case is being defined as someone using specific information about previous acts of click fraud to reverse engineer Google’s filters.

So then are we to believe that Google’s plan is to just keep the identities of the perpetrators quiet until they come up with a backup plan?  News flash, they’ve already got the backup plan, they’ve already figured out every
possible outcome.  They have filters to deal with the possibility of the reverse engineering of the filters they already have in place.

So don’t feel surprised if they don’t exactly send a CSI team to collect DNA swabs every time you get a “Click Quality Adjustment”.  So if you do happen to look at your itemized AdWords bill and see a “Click Quality Adjustment” just know that the phrase you are reading is a nice way of saying:

“somebody stole x amount of money from you (sorry we can’t tell you exactly how much or how often or when the fraud occurred) so here’s a sum we found reasonable to compensate you with.”

Go get yourself a hot dog.