Business.com--Home of click fraud? Major analysis!
I've been advertising on Business.com for a few years. At 70 cents a click, I started out thinking that it was a reasonable way to promote our business, knowing that our listings would be shown in a 'contextual' mode. Exposure is good, right?
But nowadays there's such a thing as click fraud. In this article from Wired on click fraud published today, the author says no one is doing anything about it. So here I am doing my part.
Why? My referrals from business.com have been increasing and this month they jumped. Here are the numbers from last month:
- business.com 606
- rd.business.com 55
- billed click-thrus 478
I used FastStats to filter analysis to only hits from business.com. Doing so does skew some of the numbers, as the referral is only for the first page that the visitor hits. So total time on the site and click-paths are not useful data. And then I looked at the log file for one day, when I got 117 hits! Here's some observations:
1. 559 of the page requests came from searches using their 'frame the destination page', suggesting that the clickers are using that to seach and click.
2. Referrals came from these partners on the single day:
23 from partner=2627803
52 from www.galaxysearch.com
Results from other 11 sites (opticseek.com, go4seek.com, shangrilaa.com, tobuy.com, delmonicos.net, emberhseach.com, kiligaga.com, petovia.com)
(And galaxysearch is run by what sounds like a slime-ball (read here: http://galaxysearch.com/i.html?arg=4) famous for being the first to registering sex.com. The list of coersion bragged about on galaxysearch certainly gives me no confidence that his searchers are any kind of target audience.)
3. Two of the referrers actually showed keywords used to search. They were single words of 'cycle' and 'thermal'. Hardly target searches! Note no clicks from internet.com or other major sites listed on their partner page (http://www.business.com/info/partners.asp).
4. 89% of the hits were on just one of my five registered pages with business.com. And the normal search terms for this page draw very little result from Google or Overture.
When I get a chance, I'm going to see what I can do with this information. Stay tuned.
7 Comments:
At October 22, 2004 7:32 PM, Anonymous said…
Ditto. I was charged $4000 for clicks and got just two inquires. Business.com is full of in house clickers.
At October 28, 2004 1:36 PM, ciel en papier said…
I wonder the same thing about Overture. I'll be interested to read your updates!
At November 29, 2004 7:20 AM, Dan said…
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
At December 26, 2004 1:08 AM, Inside Clickfraud said…
There are a large number of major affiliates skimming dollars from click fraud, one method they use is search hijacking using rogue dll's installed on insecure pc's, just take a look at spyware removal software like Ad-Aware to see the kind of thing I am talking about.
C.F. Consultant
http://www.clickfraud.com/
At May 13, 2005 4:48 PM, Anonymous said…
Thanks for the article. Same research here. We got nailed with $3900 over the past 4 month.
I've been doing Ad-Words for 3 years now. The most I'm paying is $0.95. Monthly it comes out to be about $250.00. FINE.
With Business.com the whole setup was kinda akward.
Few month lated,finally when our accountant questions me these charges. I logged in and realized we had some categories at rate of $3.25 and $2.00. Holly Cow!!!! where did this come up!!!
Does anyone think they changed my going rate? No proof, right? But don't you think they log the IP Address once you login?
..and my server is not even showing that many clicks. For example: April came out to be like $835.00, but I picked up with ?trackcode=bizcom only 198 Unique IP Addresses.
HEEEELPP!!!!
So what to do ? Court?
At May 13, 2005 4:49 PM, Anonymous said…
sorry. forgot to leave my info
alanmed@gmail.com
At August 06, 2006 4:26 PM, Anonymous said…
Click Fraud is an interesting topic - one which both clicktracks and adwatcher will stop, one which will cost you an estimated 20% of your ad budget.
This is an interesting article with valuable information. I have used both clicktracks and adwatcher to prevent clickfraud. What we and many other webmasters are starting to do is invest our marketing dollars into clicktracks, adwatcher or other ad tracker software.
If you are looking for more information on adwatcher or clicktracks i recommend you take a look at: http://www.trackingsoftwarereviews.com they have full reviews on both clicktracks and adwatcher!
Mike Baker
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