1. Google and the ‘Click Fraud’ Menace

2. Web search companies were being accused of overcharging for invalid clicks

3. Introduction Cost per click : 2002 Value of total settlement : US$ 90million Comment by Yahoo about their click protection system Settlement amount : US $90million low as compared to companies total revenues $6.1billion , income $1.5billion

6. Internet Advertising Internet medium opened up possibilities Digital advertising IA Target specific Ad tools used PPC Top Players

7. Google’s AdWords Program Advertisers to bid for keywords Highest bidder’s ad placed on highest point Nominal one-time activation fee Cost-per-click (CPC) pricing Cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing

8. Google’s AdSense Program Program for websites to display relevant Google ads on its content pages Google’s technology would match website content with relevant ads Fee paid by the advertiser shared by Google and the website publisher Global business could display local advertising with no additional effort

9. Google(figures in US$ Million) Yahoo!(figures in US$ Million)

10. Market shareOnline search engine companies (source:marketshare.hitslink.com)

12. Invalid clicks done manually or through software programs called ‘online bots’.

14. In order to remain undetected, the perpetrators of click fraud closely simulated genuine human visitor behavior.

15. Click fraud caused an increase in the cost per click for keywords.

17. QUANTIFYING CLICK FRAUD Contd.. Most analysts however estimate it to be in the range of 5% - 20% on the internet adds. In April 2006, the click Fraud Network which prepared a click fraud index estimated an industry wide average to be 13.7%, whereas for well known search engines like Google and Yahoo it was around 12.1. Advertisers and analysts felt the need of an individual organization to access and coordinate the level of fraudulence to counter it.

18. The Bi-directional aspect: Massive losses for the industries like Google and Yahoo. Huge opportunity for hackers and other fraudulence creators to earn quick bucks. Researchers at “Trend Micro” by studying the cybercriminal model authenticated that a medium sized ‘botnet’ could earn hackers millions of $$ a year. Example : - Search related to facebook ------ $ 0.0072. - Search related to Loans or ------- $ 2. Home Based Business Opportunities

19. Combating Click Fraud: Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for trust and safety at Google stated several factors:- - Duplicate IP address. - User session information. - Network information. - Geo-targeting and browser information. Through a sophisticated team comprising of PhDs in AI, Machine Learning & Statistics. In Nov 2004, Google filed a case against Auctions Expert International LLC for fraudulent clicking of text based adds on company websites.

20. FUTURE OUTLOOK Closely monitor customer conversion ratio with corresponding changes in the pay per click ratio Installation of fraud tracking tools Blogs, images, press releases and video content became popular Consulting services and software products were offered Absence of clear standards for determining what a fraudulent click was

21. Contd… Lack of third party clearing house One solution was to have an independent auditor Slowdown in search advertising revenue growth by 2010

22. Thank you…