History of Google company 12

Fake clicks

Samuel Baruka Cohen, 34-year-old president and founder of Lendingexpert.com, did not get the impression that something was wrong with Google. In the past, a top manager at Merrill Lynch and Bloomberg Financial Markets, Cohen became a successful businessman because he learned well the lessons of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Financial, in particular: if something seems suspicious, you need to act immediately. That's exactly what he did in early 2005.

Previously, Cohen was pleased with the cooperation with Google: thanks to him, he was able to build a profitable housing mortgage business on the Internet. The strategy of his third company was quite simple: to invest in Internet marketing, so that his company’s advertising offers ranked first on Google. Internet marketing made it possible to keep costs at a relatively low level, and also - thanks to a partnership with Google - gave Lendingexpert.com the authority necessary to attract thousands of potential customers daily and successfully compete with its main competitor - Lendingtree.com.

The business model was also simple. The person who clicked on the Lendingexpert.com advertisement got on the page where he was asked to fill out the application form for a mortgage loan. The company then, for good money, was selling completed applications that actually represented exits to potential customers, mortgage brokers and other interested persons who collected information about people who wanted to take a mortgage loan.

One day, Cohen noticed that the number of clicks on Lendingexpert.com advertising offers has increased dramatically. It seemed suspicious to him - if only because several dozen clicks came from the same IP address and none of them gave his company new customers. In other words, someone, some company or someone else's program, responded to advertisements Lendingexpert.com, while increasing its advertising costs and not filling out a mortgage application. Cohen knew about the percentage of users who responded to his promotional offers, filling out an application, and therefore it was not difficult to identify questionable clicks. In this regard, a number of questions arose: how much will its advertising costs increase? How can this be stopped? Who is behind the idle clicks? What is the purpose of this individual (or group of people)?Cohen suspected that this was not without a competitor who wanted to dramatically increase his costs and thereby cause damage to his business.

“Our business is to attract people to your website. They fill out a mortgage application there, and we sell completed applications to mortgage companies, ”says Cohen. - We do this with the help of Google and other search engines. We place a lot of advertising on Google, because most clicks come from it. In a competitive industry — such as mortgage or insurance — your competitors know that you pay Google for every click. Accordingly, one of them may ask someone to inquire about your advertisement once a thousand times a day, and if you pay from 5 to 10 dollars for one click, you will receive a very decent amount. ”

Due to the nature of his business model, Cohen could not refuse to advertise or switch to more traditional advertisements. “We are all very vulnerable,” he remarks. - We just need to advertise on search resources to attract potential customers and be in the field of view of mortgage companies. If people go to Google and type in a “commercial loan” or “construction loan”, we need to appear on this page. We must be present on search sites to remain competitive and grow.Users of search resources more often fill out an application for a mortgage loan than readers of newspapers or visitors from other online sources.

On Google, we suspected a twist of clicks. The transition level on average is 5% - that is, out of every hundred people who respond to our advertising, five fill out a form. There were too many clicks, and the number of completed applications remained the same. For the day from the same IP-address for our advertising clicked 30-40 times. It was too much. ”

Cohen turned to Nicole Berg, an employee who is responsible for marketing programs on search sites and closely follows them in the morning, afternoon and evening. Having collected the basic data, Berg - and she monitors the situation from morning to evening - also came to the conclusion that the problem exists. On January 6, 2005, Berg sent Google an email.

We are victims of flicking clicks. Our system administrator revealed the IP address from which 20 clicks were made on our ad, which cost us $ 200. We would like to return this money.

What information do you need to pay us damages?

Thank you.

“We did not expect a quick response, because, as I expected, it is very difficult to establish the fact of cheating and put an end to this,” says Cohen. - I did not harbor much hope. On the day with Google runs about 2 thousand clicks. Who will view them and find out where they come from? How to detect fake clicks at such scales? ”

Five days later, Berg received a standard response from Google.

Good afternoon, Nicole!

Thank you for sending us a notice of suspicious activity on your AdWords account.

If you can, please provide us with any of the following data - this will allow us to speed up the investigation:

- company (companies), group (s) of advertisements and / or word (s) or word combination (phrases) with which suspicious clicks are associated;

- date (s) and time when suspicious clicks were made;

- trends that have led you to conclude that click activity is suspicious;

- if you have access to online logs or reports - all data about suspicious IP addresses, links or queries.

After receiving this information, we will try to conduct a thorough investigation as soon as possible.

If you have additional questions or requests, you can write them in response to this letter.

Respectfully,

Google Click Quality Study Team

Click, click, click ... For Google and its founders, a click symbolizes the ringing of coins, a sweet sound, signifying the completion of a sale. Millions of computer users around the world click on the small ads located to the right of the search results. Every click of the mouse brings Google from 5 cents to 50 dollars. Credit card advertisers pay for the opportunity to submit a description of their product or service in the form of a small text box next to the search results. People from different parts of the globe clicked on ads day and night, at work, at home, at school, at an internet cafe, and money flowed to Google in dozens of currencies.

Google makes advertising more than $ 1 billion a year, or more than $ 100 million a month, or more than $ 3 million a day, regardless of what its employees do — awake, sleep, play beach volleyball or relax in the ski resort at the expense of the company. Since the money was arriving non-stop, Bryn and Page realized that sooner or later someone would dishonestly try to undermine this system or snatch a piece of tasty pie.

Google Reuters Chief Financial Officer George Reyes considers clicking flick as the most serious threat to a successful Google business model and long-term company profitability. There are two main types of such cheating: when companies respond to competitors' advertisements in order to increase their costs and when Google website owners click on advertisements provided to them to increase their income. Both in the first and in the second case, clicks made manually or by means of a computer program do not give access to potential customers, cause losses to advertisers and expose a weak spot in the Google advertising model, which implies a fee for each click.

Ways of dealing with cheating were, but the use of almost any of them would reduce the income. The company could hire specialists to work on this problem, and she did, but there were very few of them compared to the group that deals with new projects. She put filters in her system, blocking obviously fake clicks, but not too many, so as not to block potentially “monetary” responses.

One of the countermeasures that Google did not use was a tool adopted by the Snap.com search engine: it charged advertisers only when the user, clicking on an advertisement, carried out a specific operation — made a purchase or filled out an application form. (Google also charged advertisers for all the clicks, whether or not they followed the purchases.) Snap.com “grew” in Idealab, a West Coast business incubator, in which the idea of polling fee was born. Its new approach, though less profitable, may become popular in the future: if competition grows in the field of information retrieval on the Internet or if clickthroughs become such a serious problem that Google and Yahoo! will be forced to make concessions.

Snap McGovern, Snap's CEO, believes that the approach practiced by his company better protects against clickthroughs - especially those advertisers who do not track the process online. “With a click-through payment model, advertisers are simply stifled with clicks,” says McGovern. - Snap is the first search site where the interests of the search engine and advertisers coincide. Since advertisers pay only when a specific operation is made, the profit level on the funds invested in marketing is higher. ” Instead of paying Google or Yahoo! for each click, the advertiser may pay Snap for each sale of goods, download, access to a potential client, a subscription, or other action that has value to him. This search engine of the new generation, according to McGovern, ensures that every advertising dollar will bring a new customer.

Without a cyberpolice to search for malicious users who clicked clicks, Google responded by taking measures that did not contradict the principles of the free market: it tightened control and resorted to the services of hundreds of professionals who specialize in combating this type of virtual fraud. At the same time, there is no systematic approach to solving this problem. None of the search engines - be it Google, Yahoo! or any other - there are no financial incentives to allocate a large budget to combat wrap clicks, since search engines receive income from empty responses, and most advertisers do not notice them or do not report them. Individual advertisers may collect enough information to show that they have indeed become victims of clicks, but, acting alone, it is very difficult for them to combat this phenomenon.

Private firms that are fighting with click-throughs in the interests of advertisers are trying to prove to Google and other search resources that cheating has actually taken place, and they demand damages. Advertisers working with Google suffer from this problem mainly (but not only) because Google is the largest player in this fast-growing market. If you do not fight wrap, it will undermine the credibility of search engines so that there will be an auto-correction mechanism. Advertisers can reduce the cost of advertising on the Internet or require the immediate introduction of a new system. It is possible that large search resources will join forces in the near future to combat this problem, as large postal services have done to combat spam.

“Fake clicks were, are and will be,” says Andy Beal, an expert in the field of information retrieval. - But online advertising on search engines is very effective. At some point, the transition level may drop, say, from five percent to four and a half. In this case, instead of two dollars per click, they will simply offer 1.9 dollars. Advertisers will take for granted transitions of suspicious origin. This model is strong enough, and it will withstand them. I do not think there will be an epidemic. Advertisers will simply adjust the proposed prices to idle clicks. ”

But Robert Deinen, vice president of Internet security firm STOPzilla, considers cheating a serious problem. “It becomes a little uneasy when you count the number of clicks that are not part of the real traffic,” he says. - It is very difficult to prove, but such an activity is the most real fraud. It is very difficult to control. Organizations spend a lot of money on "correct" traffic, but it is not. In 99% of cases we have no difficulty getting compensation from Google or Yahoo !. If a problem arises, they often discover it before us and report that they have transferred a certain amount to our account. If we find a problem before, they will pay us damages in a day or two. They are very responsible approach to this. But many advertisers do not even know what is happening, because they do not have the appropriate tools. ”

Jessie Stricciola got into the click-hacking business a few years ago while doing Internet marketing at the Chase Law Group. This struggle has become her passion. Today, Stricciola, the founder and president of Alchemist Media, Inc., is mainly engaged in “fighting” with Google and Yahoo! protecting the interests of advertisers, and provides the latter with the tools necessary to seek compensation from the search giants themselves. During her work in this area she has had to deal with a wide variety of feedback schemes.

She recalls how one company selling electronic equipment placed its ads on Google and Yahoo! one day she discovered a significant increase in the number of transitions, which, however, did not give her access to potential clients. It turned out that the empty responses that were provoked by a certain program originate from an IP address, which is owned by one of the main competitors of this company. The problems that began in 2003 have not been resolved, despite the fact that the company has been proving Google and Yahoo! for half a year. that it is nothing more than cheating clicks. Failing to recover damages, she resorted to the services of Alchemist Media. Soon, events took an unexpected turn. An anonymous message has been sent to the company's email address: “I want you to know: deliberately clicks on your advertisements and damages you. I know this for sure, because I once worked for them and was engaged in developing a program that provokes fake clicks. ” A video file was attached to the message, where it was demonstrated how exactly the click wrapping is performed without human intervention. Each of them cost the advertiser from 6 to 15 dollars.

After Stricciola has joined, Yahoo! returned the money to the client, and Google refused. Because of this, the advertiser, who later filed a lawsuit against his competitor, suffered losses amounting to several hundred thousand dollars. Stricciola is convinced that it was a real cheat. Several dozen lawsuits, the subject of which were fake clicks on Google and Yahoo! settled out of court, she notes. According to Stricciola, Yahoo! more often than Google, goes to meet advertisers affected by the cheat clicks.

“Google has gained the dubious fame of a company that completely ignores advertisers,” she said. - Google says: “Thank you for your inquiry. But we do not see problems here. ” Sometimes Google experts don't even look at the reports and just give a ridiculous explanation. Yahoo!while practicing a more far-sighted approach, its experts are trying to get to the heart of the matter. That’s why some advertisers end up losing patience, and they ask me to help me gather the technical evidence Google requires. In addition, Yahoo! provides advertisers with click-wrap data, while Google does not, even if it compensates for the losses. They say they do not want to disclose information about their tracking technologies, because attackers can take advantage of this. ”

Google does not agree with this Stricciola characteristic. “We believe that we effectively handle click spam,” says brand manager Salar Kamangar. The word "spam" instead of "cheating" he used deliberately - to emphasize that not all dubious clicks are made maliciously.

“I would characterize the cheating losses as insignificant,” he notes. “We have a software system that filters out fake clicks before money is collected from advertisers.” We practice a conservative approach in counting, discarding everything that looks suspicious. Our experts are constantly improving the software. We also have a group that investigates cases described by customers. We filed a lawsuit against the company that was engaged in clickthrough, but if such a company is based in another country, it is more difficult to do so. Therefore, we are focused on identifying fake clicks, determining where they come from, and providing advertisers with the tools they need to track the effectiveness of their investment and the ability to make clicks. ”

In the case of LendingexperL.com, Google’s timely response (and compensation provided later) revealed a number of realities and risks of online advertising. First, Google, unlike small search engines, responds to requests from many advertisers who claim that they have suffered losses due to allegedly idle clicks, and even has a special department, whose specialists work on specific cases of clickthroughs and over the problem as a whole. Secondly, the burden of proof lies on the advertiser, not on the search engine. Third, compared to credit card companies that trust customers to the word and, until the investigation is completed, they do not debit their card accounts for the amounts “caught” during allegedly fraudulent transactions, Google is in a better position because it first receives incomeand only then decides whether to compensate the losses to the advertiser who made the relevant claim.

In other words, Google has information, but there is no desire to allocate significant resources to combat the click-throughs. But many advertisers, by contrast, want to demand compensation for losses incurred due to such cheating, but do not always have the information necessary to confirm the validity of their claims. According to a recent study, 30% of all clicks can be false. Its authors note that Google effectively counteracts idle clicks that originate from the same IP address, but has problems with detecting cheating facts carried out by special software tools that hide their origin.

In addition, the individual partner sites, over time, are just signs that serve to generate advertising revenue. In order to discourage someone from such activities and to show that it keeps track of all instances of clickthroughs, in 2004, Google filed a lawsuit in the amount of $ 50,000 against the fictitious AuctionsExpert.com website. However, some experts interpreted this as window-dressing, stating that the company thus wants to exemplary punish a single site, instead of seriously tackling the problem.

In fairness, it's worth noting that Yahoo! has certain controls that prevent the clicks that Google doesn’t have. For example, website owners who want to place Google ads on their pages can join the Google system online within a few minutes, while Yahoo! carefully examines the "ins and outs" of each new site, before making a decision. Google doesn’t seem to have any controls to identify resources whose owners want to turn them into virtual pumps that make a profit by clicking on the advertising links on their pages. She seems to be more interested in attracting new websites around the world to promote her brand, experts say. “We take the problem of flicking clicks very seriously,- says financial director George Reyes. “And although we do not promise that in the future we will be able to stop all attempts at fake clicks, we are pleased with the results of the fight against this phenomenon.”