One solution for combating click fraud

With all recent media coverage on click fraud in pay-per-click online advertising, many people are voicing their skepticism on the possibility of finding a definitive solution for this problem. Some are even willing to accept those losses as normal part of doing business.

The danger is that if those fraudulent clicks are generated automatically, with enough sophistication, they may go undetected, and their effect can snowball, wasting large amounts of advertising budgets.

For some devious techniques for click fraud, hard to detect, you can read my previous posts here and here.

However I believe there are measures that can be taken to curb this type of fraud. The root problem is the fact that there’s no thorough screening of the affiliate partners done by the most popular providers of ads. Anyone with a blog can get an AdSense account, which they can later abuse.

What’s needed is a way to qualify the web pages showing the ads. Some mechanism similar to PageRank. The advertisers should be given the option to choose a minimum rank for the affiliates that will display their ads. Or the option to place different bids and budgets for each rank. That would give a lot of flexibility to the advertisers, while still allowing new entrants in this industry.

One could ask, what should this new ranking method be ? Some companies perform this ranking manually, by handpicking the publishers that are allowed to display their ads. For instance, you can use the “Advertise on this site” link that appears in AdSense banners and create a campaing targeted for specific sites. However this is not truly a ranking, since it allows only 2 values, either in or out.

A better approach should perform the ranking automatically. A rudimentary heuristic could choose the maximum PageRank for all segments of the URL of the page. For example http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/17/working_deepfried_pc.html would have the same ranking as http://www.boingboing.net.


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