Last week when visiting Google, I had a long background discussion with
Shuman Ghosemajumder about click fraud issues. Shuman is Google’s business
product manager for trust and safety. I’ll follow up on some of our discussion
as I’m able to get some material cleared. But one of the most fascinating things
was his explanation on how some third party auditing firms don’t appear to be
matching up estimated fraud figures with refunds or even actual clicks
registered by advertisers.
Some of what he explained is now covered in two blog posts up on his personal
blog: Why Third-Party Click
Fraud Estimates Don’t Add Up and
Why Third-Party Click Fraud
Estimates Don’t Add Up – Part 2. The second part especially gets into a big
issue now with Google — that back button actions in a browser appear to be
registered by some firms as a further "paid" click, when they are not.
Give the posts a read. As I said, I expect to be coming back to the issue in
more depth in the future. Both, of course, have come out in reaction to
yesterday’s news
from Click Forensics that click fraud is at an all time high, based on its
network.