How Google detects invalid clicks Monday, June 22, 2009

If you had landed on this page venturing how google detects invalid clicks, you are at the right place. The mechanism Google uses is as good and efficient as its search and its well mature at this point of time I would say. Because a lot of people tried to make more money by cheating Google, they took all this input to formulate their secret formula to detect invalid clicks. Adsense is one program which earns google a lot of revenue. Here are some things that I think they would take into account to detect invalid clicks. If you are a web master or a user of Google analytics, you'll know this better.

IP Address - If you are connected to Internet you are assigned an individual ip address and if you've noticed carefully and most consumer Internet connections are assigned dynamic ip address and each time you connect to the Internet you have a different ip address based on a scheduling by your isp. If Google can track you by ip address one might think why not disconnect and connect again to get a different ip address. Clever boy! but never forget, its the same isp and you are given ip within a range allotted to your isp. No matter how many times you disconnect and connect to the Internet you will remain in the same range which lets google know that the click is coming from the same range. Now they raise their eye brows and the following factors will let them detect that it is the same user.

Cookies - If you enter any web site with Google ads, they put a cookie into your browser and if it expires only after a year or so. Unless you delete it, its got an unique identifier to identify when was the cookie planted and that's how they identify you uniquely. Repeated clicks from the user having same cookie is just the most dumb way of getting caught. If you delete the cookie from browse each time before browsing, Google knows the click is coming from a new user all the time, when it detects invalid clicks. Got it? There is no way to cheat Google, unless you are a Internet expert or junkie who cheated for a long time, or possibly got caught many times.

Click Patterns - When one does click on own ads, they tend to click only theirs not other ads or not on other sites. which is a really different behaviour from ordinary. When one intends to make invalid clicks they click and try to run away from the site. Moving on to click on another ad. This behaviour could be tracked. Google knows how much of time a genuine visitor spends on a target site linked from ad. Technically this is called bounce rate.

CTR - Google has the statistics of how much CTR does a visitor from search engine would produce.

CTR from Google side - A well performing ad will have good CTR. If one tries to cheat Google, its for sure they might click a non performing ads in a row. which alerts them.

Mac addr - This is the hardware address of your Ethernet card. I'm sure packets flowing a network use this for a lot of purposes including authentication to enter a network in case of corporations. In other case, it may not be the case, stuff like dial up does not have a Ethernet mac address.

Traffic sources - If a site is new or a site penalized by google for illegal content, it probably does not have traffic from search results. When such sites have high traffic, this is something that they might count on.

Location Geo Tracking - With your ip address, Google can target ads to a particular city or even a small town. The same is used to detect invalid clicks. They can easily know where you are located. Its also easy to use proxy site, unfortunately proxy sites are a outdated way of making such invalid clicks, one could easily get caught. The next dumb way of getting caught is using proxy. They have a list of all proxy servers across the world. I need not give a reason for you to believe that.

There are a lot of other factors that Google knows about a particular user like

1. Network speed and latency
2. Your screen resolution
3. Google user's web history
4. Surfing patterns
5. A site's user patterns
6. Points where one user clicks on screen
7. Points on site where a normal user clicks

Possibly a hybrid artificial intelligence algorithm learning and predicting about users and traffic behaviour on web. We'll never know it. We'll never know if Google uses it for invalid click detection or not. It is impossible to cheat Google's systems. Also, any violation of adsense TOS will also be detected easily.

Here are ten reasons why you shouldn't cheat Google.

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions about the subject.

Adsense and Adbrite Sunday, November 23, 2008

These days I've found almost all of the commercial sites run with Adsense or Adbrite ads blended with their templates, well optimized and probably having good click through rates. Forums also have engaged their users with ads. What really happens is that the site owners are happy that they are making a good amount of money, the other side of it is that having ads that are very relevant means you are giving a link to a competitor who might be better than you eventually losing a valuable or loyal customer. Might be that customer chose to buy a product from your competitor instead of you just because there was a link from you to your competitor. The click on the ad might have earned you at most $2 but because the customer chose not to buy your product you might have incurred a loss of $xxx. The fact also is that you cannot live in an island on the web. One of the possible ways to solve the problem is not to advertise, which is not an option but to place ads in places where it is likely to pickup key words that show ads that do not point to your direct competitors but to point to words relating to your site.

There is also one more thing. Adwords people are not just writing some text on their ad. Carefully chosen and powerful words in their text ads. When your ad blends with your site's template, it looks like a part of your site and so is the reason why a visitor chose to read the text, some ads are really powerful that grabs their attention and keeps them occupied with advertisers site.

Some folks say they are happy with adsense because when their customers look for something and don't find that in their site, ads give them what they wanted. This is just one possibility of what might run in the mind of the visitor.

Around 65 percent of the Internet users never click on their ads, still the Internet advertising industry is making huge profits and growing into an unstoppable force. Take a look at the success stories featured in adsense, these are sites that have something unique for themselves and they have repeat visitors who helped them earn more from the ads.

All of this comes down to make it a point that if your site does not have something unique and prove worthy to a visitor, he has a lot of options to choose from, its right in front in the ads.

Ads are closing in! Sunday, October 19, 2008

Watch out... It might be standing right next to you.

I almost never pay for anything I take from the Internet. Of course all of these are free stuff, for which these web sites get their visitors. I live in India and this is the way it works for most of Indians. Advertising campaigns are effective on Google, the most important reason is that they keep throwing the same ad across all the sites you use. The same ad shows up on all sites that I visit, that has partnered with Google on adsense. This is one of the hundreds of tricks that Google uses for advertising on web sites. The ad that is right on top of my gmail's inbox an one line text ad grabs my attention, because of its placement.

When Google launched Chrome, I saw it running on my friend's computer, I dint like it. I chose not to download it on to my computer. But guess what Google did to persuade me to get chrome, it placed that ad in the right place, as a text ad above gmail inbox, after it showed up for a series of sites where this ad was chasing me, all of those places are where I avoided ads. Look! this ad followed me till my gmail inbox and finaly I clicked on to see what the heck this chrome is all about. There comes the funneling strategy, showed up a good squeeze ad page for Chrome and finally I downloaded it.

I wonder what would happen to the music industry if content distribution is not controlled, well is there a way to control distribution? I'm not thinking about the possibilities like digitally preventing copy theft or something like that. But the large user base held by peer to peer software users could be controlled to some extent but cannot be eliminated. In India, the ISP s never do anything to prevent the spread of illegal music, up in the Internet cloud, probably because they have enough bandwidth to feed their hungry downloaders. But this situation will change when more people get connected to the Internet. There will be a time when an ISP X who slows down P2P downloads and another will make it by not doing it and gain market share. I'll probably choose the second option :-)