erm, isnt this just a spurious lawsuit to gain mucho publicity for Click
Defense, whose principal product is a piece of software that detects
click fraud?


----------------------
http://www.abcseo.com/

What is amusing if you read the filing is that it is a class action
lawsuit filed by Click Defense on behalf of thousands of people who they
haven't yet been identified but CD hopes to be able to identify during
the discovery phase.

So what CD want to do is trawl through Google's records to see if they
can find people who have suffered from click fraud - maybe by
identifying people who are reimbursed, then they intend to email those
people to see if they are interested in joining a class action against
Google.

Google clearly does some click-fraud detection, CD claims in their
filing that they do no detection. Whether the Google detection is
sophisticated enough to detect fraud originating from zombie PCs etc is
not clear and Google is incredibly secretive about its activities so
maybe the lawsuit will turn up some interesting information about Google.

Clearly, as CD says, Google benefits from fraudulent clicks in the short
term, but long them they will destroy their only business model - one
that has their shares valued at $300, a crazy figure.



----------------------
http://www.abcseo.com/

We spent over 300k last year with google and have had about 500 repaid by
them for Click Fraud. IMHO anything from 20 - 50% of CPC is fraudulant.

Oh it's clearly a bullshit action. I mean, how can you tell if someone
clicks a link "with no intention of doing business with the
advertiser" ???

Matt

--
Free searchable encyclopaedia content for your web site:
http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/xsearch.htm

How do you know the clicks were fraudulent?

I guess if you find multiple clicks in quick succession from a single
IP address or session (cookie tracked) that might be a giveaway. But
not the individual clicks that don't transform into business, as these
may just be the curious, or legitimate "window shoppers".

I'm not denying the fraud, just curious as to how one can determine
what is fraud and what is NPW.

Matt

--
Over 16,000 searchable slang definitions from around
the 'English' speaking world.

http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/slang.htm

If it's a click without conviction, sometimes called a "hanging click",
it usually indicates an accidental and un-intended "event".


--
Mike

Yes the 20% figure is bandied about a lot and I don't doubt that a lot
of clickers have no intention of buying making a purchase which is
frustrating for advertisers and that there is also fraud going on
-either to burn up a rival's add budget (the so called midnight
clickers) or to make money for the website hosting ads.

Still looking at the bigger picture, for your 300K spent how much profit
did you make? I understand CD's problem that Google makes money whether
clicks are fraudulent or not but presumably for advertisers, if they are
not making money with a form of advertising then they will stop doing
it. You could say much the same for any kind of advertising that isn't
linked to an eventual sale to be honest.




----------------------
http://www.abcseo.com/

If 20 - 50% of the people who click through to your site do not buy anything
or do anything, like phoning in or sending an email, it is probably because
they thought your site looked like it might be interesting and would
hopefully solve their search need and no more. Maybe if you phrase the ads
to indicate you only selling things and are not an information source then
it will reduce the proportion of non-purchasing visitors.
Check your logs to see if any visitors come with inappropriate search terms.
These will be dissatisfied visitors who back out immediately. You need to
delete misleading words from your site and links.
My experience is worse, in that about 98% of visitors don't 'do' very much;
they just browse around for a while and then disappear. If you pay all
these people to come, it is only the 2% who actually buy that matter if you
are selling things.
Web sites doing the Adsense scheme can help by blocking every ad they see
from irrelevent and inappropriate web sites. This will save some people
from clicking on inapproprate ads.
Best regards, Eric.

I take it then that it wasn't vhsholdings.com that was the intended
beneficiary of the advertising?

Matt

--
A massive matrix of concise, interlinked encyclopaedia information.
For when you just want to know, quickly and easily.
http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com

I wish!! no, my clients were.

They're happy and we get a good bonus.

Regards
Vance

--

Possibly. OTOH, they may have a legitimate complaint.

There have been cases where a competitor clicked hundreds of times on an
ad to drive up ad costs.

I have to say that I probably actually do business with maybe 5% of the PAID
ads I click-through on Google. Does that mean that 95% of my clicks are
fraudulent?

Or does that mean that 95% of the sites I click through to don't have the
product or service I want at the price I want?


Do you ask for a refund if your newspaper ad brings in a lot of people to
look at your store, but nobody buys anything?

--
Tony Garcia
Web Right! Development

.... then 50-80% of the people who click through DID.

--
Tony Garcia
Web Right! Development

Hey, don't say that about their stock price. I like crazy figures when
they are putting money in my pocket. The price will be $350 a share
soon, so it's still a good value at $300. :-)

--
Red

When it's done multiple times?
--
Red

I've wondered if that's what's happening when I see crazy (well above
average0 CTRs and CPMs on my AdSense site.

RFM

Multiple "clicks" might *not* be a giveaway.

Ten different text-only users at my ISP following the same link would
all register as coming from the same IP address. (Only those with
graphical access would have differing IP addresses.)

Another consideration is that *one* lynx user may have good reason to
fetch a page multiple times -- a *lot* of multiple times.

1. I go to a page with lynx. (one fetch)
2. I see what is obviously JavaScript that is supposed to be hidden
as it ends with "// -->" so I press the ' (apostrophe) key to toggle
comment parsing from "historical" to "valid" to get rid of the
comments. (lynx refetches the page to re-render it)
3. I see some character entities scattered around, especially " ".
Some (usually invalid) markup confuses lynx while in one parsing mode
and recognition of character entities gets disabled following that
markup. Pressing Control-V to toggle the parsing algorithm (to/from
"TagSoup" to "SortaSGML") used will usually re-enable proper rendering
of character entities. (one more fetch).
4. I scroll down and find a link that I want to follow but I can't select
it because the webmaster used an image as a label and set the alt text
to "" so there is nothing to select. I press '*' to turn on links to
images so the unselectable "[4]" link becomes "[8] [LINK]-[9] [IMAGE]"
and is now accessible. (one more fetch)
5. I find that the link contains "javascript:getfoo();" so I have to press
the '' key to view the page source to see what URL is referenced by
the getfoo() function. (another fetch)
6. I now want to continue viewing the rendered page so I press the '' key
again to return to normal. (another fetch)
7. Repeat 5. and 6. for other JavaScript URLs as necessary. (some more
fetches).
8. Every link I follow on the page may lead to a large page that forces
the original page out of the limited lynx cache. Returning to the
original page with the back-arrow key may lead to re-fetching the page
again. (some more fetches)

--
Norman De Forest http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Profile.html
[Email Removed] [=||=] (A Speech Friendly Site)
Hippopotamus robin sheep sheep, hippopotamus sparrow sheep sheep,
hippopotamus canary doe Canada, hippopotamus parrot sheep sheep.

Fetches don't count. You have to click on the ad and GO TO the linked
site.

Why would anyone be a Lynx user? Sounds ridiculous.

Not if you're a webmaster.

Lynx does a pretty fair job of indicating how search engines see your site.

It also approximates how people using speech readers (e.g. blind people)
might "view" your site. Web accessibility for vision impaired people is
required by law for certain categories of sites in many countries. More and
more countries are requiring it for more site categories and it's a pretty
good bet that in addition to public governmental sites, commercial site
requirements for it will grow.

--
dp

That question sounds like Troll-speak, but not everyone likes GUIs.
some people use character-based terminals, why? oh only that they are
fast, efficient, and run on an 8086 with 64Kb of RAM.

Matt

--
Free, high quality content for web sites. See
http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/xcont.htm

lol - I have an 8086 with 64Kb of RAM. Use it as a door stop on one of the
side doors. The other doors are stopped with a PET/4, a Z80, and a C-64. The
PET/4 also does double duty (no pun intended) as an excellent mechanism for
scraping dog poop of your feet when entering the domicile.

--
dp

Three or four years ago, one of the text-account users at my ISP upgraded
his computer system -- to a Commodore 64. Prior to that, he was using a
TRS-80 Model I. He switched to the C-64 so he could download and display
GIFs on his PC.

A lot of low-income users at my ISP have only text accounts. They connect
with a terminal program and use Lynx 2.7ac running on my iSP's system as
the browser.

I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into getting a PPP account only a
few years ago after having a text account for years an years. I used Lynx
to download a firewall and AV software before I dared connect and then
grabbed all of the back security updates before daring to use the computer
for anything else. I also installed Firefox when I first heard about it
and now have three versions installed. IE is only used to get Microsoft
updates or for the occasional check after reviewing a site with Lynx.

Many sites are *much* faster to load with Lynx. One local site, before
they changed it[1], was only accessible with Lynx because trying to access
it with a graphical browser downloaded several megabytes of images and a
3.8MB audio file. I never did get one of the pages to render with Firefox
as my login session was repeatedly cut off for exceeding my allotted
login session time before the images were loaded and the browser was able
to start rendering the page.

The main page had some links inaccessible for graphical browsers because
it used frames with scrolling disabled and some of the links were off
the right-hand edge of the screen and unreachable. Lynx made each of the
frames accessible separately and ignored the noscroll attributes so those
links *were* accessible with Lynx.

[1] I pointed out the difficulties with their site and they claimed to be
unsatisfied themselves. They were getting someone else to redesign
the site. They went from the frying pan to the fire. The new site
uses Flash to display some pointless moving images and play the same
3.8MB sound file as before but now, instead of it being downloadable
and playable on a low-bandwidth connection, it takes ten seconds to
download a second of the sound, plays that, takes another ten seconds
to download more sound, plays it for a second, ..., etc. You can't
get the sound to play in a continuous stream any more nor cache it
to play later.
--
">> consider moving away from Front Page...."
">To what? Any suggestions?"
"Naked bungee-jumping. It's less humiliating <g>"
-- Matt Probert in alt.www.webmaster, March 20, 2005

They're either lightning to load or are incomprehensible. A list of
[LINK]'s with an [IMG] scattered here and there, or [spacer.gif] for
those who always fill out the alt attribute. Wonder where the random
[LINK] goes? Or "Your browser is not supported by our inability to
properly implement HTML. Please download IE* [LINK]".

leo

--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/

Indeed.

But I turn the tables on graphical browser users once in a while
and replace my home page for a day or two with one that is as hostile
for graphical browers as badly-designed sites are hostile for Lynx
(but still Lynx-friendly). One example:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/protest4.html

--
Can you Change: *alchemy to alchemy* (* == Unicorn)
mindworks mindworks
in 103 moves? Try http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/AMPuzzle.html
(Requires a browser supporting the W3C DOM such as Firefox or IE ver 6)

First I have to apologize. I meant [INLINE] instead of [IMG]. Second,
it's great! Unfortunately, it's the deezyners that have to get a clue. I
may be wrong, but I actually think that sites are getting better
lynxwise. It's not necessarily for the disabled but for the importance
given to search engines. Everybody benefits. I'm not sure if that's
actually correct. It's just a feeling I have. Where's that guy that did
a thesis on the 98 or 99 percent of sites that failed simple validation.
He ought to run another study. Just for me :-)

leo

--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/