Is it Click or Impression Fraud?
December 16, 2006
Like usual, I view my stats for a given campaign running every morning, and today was just another day until… I compared my stats. Today after running the same campaign and dropping the CPC by $0.40 my traffic grew overnight from 400,000k to 4.2 Million? Strange… yes.
What’s even more peculiar is that all the users came for a visit between 3am – 6am all from content network sites… and from the same IP ah ha. One way to inflate impression or produce click fraud is to conceal your IP’s and keep under the radar, but this guy must have been a rookie.
So make a long story short, same date last week I had 300 clicks, 400k impressions with 60% CPA conversions – today same day with a lower CPC I have 4,300 clicks, 4.2 Million Impressions 10% CPA conversions. Is it click fraud or impression fraud well perhaps and I will take the next step (digging into my web metrics) to find additional reasons to have a chat with Google.
If you need help identifying if you’re a victim of click or impression fraud, please send an email, I’ll take a look. Anyone is search has heard of pepperjam another great search firm that had recent issues with yahoo marketing and click fraud.
-B
