Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are seeing plenty about the issue of “click fraud” lately…
As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case Lane’s Gifts v. Google, Google agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine Google detection methods, practices, policies, and procedures.
The result of that is a 47-page report, written by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University
Google has built the following four ‘lines of defense’ for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.
The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of Google’s inspection systems and notes their constant improvement…