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Fraud in Sponsored Links and how to deal with it

The Sponsored Links, a new kind of online publicity where the seller pays only when an internet user clicks their ad, is under a serious threat: the fraud.
The Sponsored Links fraud endangers a whole industry that is growing around this type of advertisement. Google and Yahoo declared that they are paying the most serious attention to the issue and working on its solution. The fraud takes place when someone clicks the link without a real interest in the advertisement. The most common types of fraud are:

a) When your ad is exposed in the search engine results and is clicked by your competitor in order for you to spend your entire budget without any return.

b) When your ad is exposed in the Yahoo's or Google's partners network and the partner itself clicks on the ad in order to earn more money.

In the first case, the only ones possibly interested in committing the fraud are the competitors. However, as the competitors themselves are also using the Sponsored Links system, the fear of being discovered and banished from the system must inhibit less ethical actions. Now in the case of the partners network, the problem is much worse. Any organization or individual that owns a website or blog can be a part of Google's (Adsense) or Yahoo's partners network. Even if you don't own a website but only the domain name, you can use the domain parking services , which present a page with dynamic ads from those search systems. It may well be noted that there are no rigorous criteria to join the partners networks and anyone can do it. The partner's networks are wide and on the rise.

The aim of the creation of the partner network was clear; Google and Yahoo increased the reach of their ads and their range

The partner becomes an important piece of the search engine as they cash in part of the profit from the ads presented in their website.

The problem resides in the fact that the partner's interest is to maximize their profits, and they only need a visitor or a robot to visit their site and click on the ads to get a small profit. As the partners network is wide, there are several types of partners. In the web there are some programs called Clickbots, used to simulate the visit to a website and click on one or more ads. This kind of software is hard to be detected and works automatically. If the partner doesn't have as much tech knowledge, they can hire a PTR company (Pay-to-Read Companies). Those companies pay users to visit websites, but actually they work as great networks of users interested in reading and clicking on ads. In this very special case it is almost impossible to detect the fraud, since it is not performed automatically and therefore not in a regular fashion.

How to avoid fraud

Many precautions can be taken to minimize the effect of fraud in sponsored links campaigns:

• Make it specific. Try to use keywords with 2 or more words. Keywords with only one word are more susceptible to fraud.
• Avoid obvious keywords.
• Use keyword trackers, like ClickAuditor
• Disable the Content Network system.
• Keep an eye on your visitors log. If your website has a statistics analysis system for the visiting log, look for a "Main Visitors" section. This section lists the main visitors with their IP addresses. If any given IP address shows more than 50 hits in a month, send it to Adwords so they can check whether the clicks coming from this address are fraudulent. The most well-known and widespread log statistics analysis system is Webtrends. See if your hosting service provider offers this system for your website.
• Under no circumstances whatsoever click your competitors' ads. Fraud must be fought in every possible way. If you're caught by Yahoo/Google trying to cheat on your competitors' campaign be ready to face legal consequences and be banned from the system. Play it fair! !