Founder / Director / Co-founder at easyBacklog / Aqueduct / Econsultancy
28 May 2004 10:16am
Well, here it is. Fake traffic that is close to indistinguishable from real traffic: I-Faker.
Forget India's secret army of online ad 'clickers' we now have professional software which does it for us, which is user friendly enough for any user to start faking their traffic and potentially making money, or wiping the profits of their competitors..
The software is pretty clever
It uses proxy servers to route traffic through so that you cannot ban a single IP address / range of IP addresses
It can include random referrer headers or a string of Google referrers based on keywords you enter - i.e. if you want to show effectiveness of the search terms "Cheat", "I am stealing your money", "Look at me count the pounds" you can set those up. The referrals will have those keywords effectively making the referred traffic look more authentic
It can post to forms, store cookies, control the amount of traffic to show per hour
Updates automatically with new proxies daily so the list is constantly changing.
So what this means is the Googles, the Overtures, sites selling Media Space and everyone else making money off CPC or CPM are going to potentially have a problem if this becomes a mainstream worry in people's minds. I imagine advertisers will be very weary of paying according to traffic levels or clicks, but will want to pay on some form of performance / conversion metric. This is feasible maybe for the very large players, but completely infeasible for the smaller players - there is no way Google or the likes would take the time or entertain the idea of earning money once a conversion has occurred.
I don't know what the next step is then, but I imagine search companies and media space sellers will need to start making assurances that they are able to detect this traffic and ignore it. I would be interested to see if they really can - I don't believe software such as I-Faker will leave a foot print that is easily detected. Maybe there is room for a new service which audits all traffic and removes all fake traffic by making sure it is always up to date with all the fake traffic generators globally - a mammoth task but I imagine could be done through some kind of collaboration between all the larger players in the market.
Matt
Lemon Foundation Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
Alex Chudnovsky
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
28 May 2004 11:08am
Companies like Google, Overture etc refuse to disclose their anti-fraud methods, perhaps justifiably but lets be honest here - they have serious conflict of interest, especially companies which derive majority of revenues from PPC activity.
I think there will be a big re-evaluation of pay-per-click activities ultimately concentrated on _real_ profits (confirmed shipped sales less fraud, returns etc) achieved by using various pay per click activities.
Naturally PPC providers won't like it because many of them will consider that its job of the target site to convert leads into sales. They might not like it, but at the end of the day "He who pays the piper calls the tune" - people pay more and more attention to ROI these days, so if clicks do not actually perform (based on confirmed orders, less returns, fraud etc), then a lot of activity will be abandoned.
I downloaded the trail on this yesterday and set it running on a test site while doing some surfing.
I've just had a look at the proccessed logs and if it wasn't for the stupid referers from google I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I had about 1800 page impressions and 550+ i.p. addresses in the space of about an hour.
This is worrying stuff and its cheap software under $100!
Can't see how it would increase the number of clicks though and thats not a discussion for here I know.
The CPA advertisers will be rubbing their hands with glee really and publishers like myself will lose out.
Don't know what can be done about this really...hide and hope it goes away? ;-)
Cheers
John Wards
SportNetwork.net
Alex Chudnovsky
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
30 May 2004 14:47pm
> Don't know what can be done about this
> really...hide and hope it goes away? ;-)
i say cap your daily budget to ensure you won't lose it all
and patiently wait - it will happen, just a matter of time.
Perhaps this will finally get people to recognise that a mear banner click or click on the home page is not the basis on which to measure the success (or pay for) on-line advertising.
You are trying to attract people to the site who have more than a passing interest, or accidentally land on your site - you want interested people, who engage with your proposition and with which you can establish a longer-term (and hopefully profitable) relationship.
Our customers use our solutions to measure their campaigns ability to achieve that goal - and it is not hard... spending perhaps 10% of an on-line adverttising budget will provide solutions which can (and these are their words not mine) a 30% to 100% improvement in campaign performance and profitability.
So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers, and impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the people which a campaign delivers which make money or sence!
On 09:37:05 2 June 2004 Malcolm Duckett wrote:
>So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers, and
>impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the
>people which a campaign delivers which make money or sence!
I totaly agree with this Malcolm, but being a publisher I would ;-)
I still find it daft when an advert gets pulled from my site because its click rate is not very good...why would my loyal visitors who are on my site for a very good reason suddenly drop every thing to visit another site?
But they might make a mental note of the URL or the product even if they don't realise and go back later....
Its stupid to think that when someone is watching a tv programme, reading a paper or listening to the radio the suddenly stop what they are doing and go and wander round...Ikea...A car show room....A super market looking for that product etc
But we expect users to do it, why? Some of the blame has to be layed at the door of the agencies in the early days of the internet who persumed this and sold advertising to companies in the way..the great accountablity rubbsih.
Absolutely John - we're about to publish a new report on rich media / interactive advertising and can only hope that the wider ad industry stops hiding behind click-through rates as a tangible way of measuring response.
Using clicks to gauge the performance of an ad campaign is crazy, when there are far better ways of measuring response. Interactions will become increasingly valuable, and ad formats that support and encourage - rather than demand - action on the part of the user are surely the way forward. The interactivity rate could become the de facto measurement standard in the coming years.
As you say, people do not watch a TV ad then rush down to their local shopping mall to buy the product. This has pretty much been the expectation of the banner ad. The majority of rich media formats have also demanded action on the part of the user, missing the point of these new formats entirely. So-called rich ads, such as overlays, require the user to click if he/she wants to continue reading the story. Many clicks can be attributed to users trying to get rid of these intrusive ads, as was the case with pop-ups.
More often than not, I find myself heading straight for the 'back' button, to find a substitute story. Now that news aggregators such as Google News are becoming a more popular way of surfing/searching for relevant content, first impressions seem to count for so much more. There are, after all, a bunch more stories available on other sites just two clicks away. Why suffer intrusive ads when you don't have to? Why ban pop-ups then allow overlays to ruin the user experience? And what are the additional benefits, in terms of measurement, that an overlay provides over and above the banner?
Best-in-breed rich formats are better for advertisers, who can measure a range of interactions and capture data without the user needing to navigate elsewhere. Which makes things better for the publisher. And since the user is in control of the ad, the user experience isn't savaged, so they are also better for consumers (who can respond, expand ads, enter personal data, watch videos, toggle sound on/off etc on their terms). The response - and the ability to measure this response - is said to be well worth the extra costs incurred in creating these ads.
The banner still has a part to play, in a kind of signposting role after the message has been delivered via TV/rich media/print, but let's hope those swinish overlays die an early death. Otherwise, 'rich media', in the eye of the user, might go the same way as the dreaded pop-up.
PS - I'd love to hear from anyone running rich media campaigns - we're looking for case studies and statistics to help back up some of these arguments. Contact me at to discuss.
c.
On 09:46:55 2 June 2004 John Wards wrote:
>On 09:37:05 2 June 2004 Malcolm Duckett wrote:
>>So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers,
>and
>>impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the
>>people which a campaign delivers which make money or
>sence!
>
>I totaly agree with this Malcolm, but being a publisher I
>would ;-)
>
>I still find it daft when an advert gets pulled from my
>site because its click rate is not very good...why would
>my loyal visitors who are on my site for a very good
>reason suddenly drop every thing to visit another site?
>
>But they might make a mental note of the URL or the
>product even if they don't realise and go back later....
>
>Its stupid to think that when someone is watching a tv
>programme, reading a paper or listening to the radio the
>suddenly stop what they are doing and go and wander
>round...Ikea...A car show room....A super market looking
>for that product etc
>
>But we expect users to do it, why? Some of the blame has
>to be layed at the door of the agencies in the early days
>of the internet who persumed this and sold advertising to
>companies in the way..the great accountablity rubbsih.
>
>HoHum.
>John
One of the main problems is surfers using anonymous proxies to increase their click-through payments in programs such as adsense. I sometimes question where my "hits" are coming from. I will be trying countrycheck.com
What are others using? At some stage this will become a serious problem.
On 11:08:35 28 May 2004 Alex Chudnovsky wrote:
Companies like Google, Overture etc refuse to disclose their anti-fraud methods, perhaps justifiably but lets be honest here - they have serious conflict of interest, especially companies which derive majority of revenues from PPC activity.
I think there will be a big re-evaluation of pay-per-click activities ultimately concentrated on _real_ profits (confirmed shipped sales less fraud, returns etc) achieved by using various pay per click activities.
Naturally PPC providers won’t like it because many of them will consider that its job of the target site to convert leads into sales. They might not like it, but at the end of the day "He who pays the piper calls the tune" - people pay more and more attention to ROI these days, so if clicks do not actually perform (based on confirmed orders, less returns, fraud etc), then a lot of activity will be abandoned.
I assume that countrycheck.com can block those fake hits.
On 10:16:12 28 May 2004 matt wrote:
Well, here it is. Fake traffic that is close to indistinguishable from real traffic: I-Faker.
Forget India’s secret army of online ad ’clickers’ we now have professional software which does it for us, which is user friendly enough for any user to start faking their traffic and potentially making money, or wiping the profits of their competitors..
The software is pretty clever
It uses proxy servers to route traffic through so that you cannot ban a single IP address / range of IP addresses
It can include random referrer headers or a string of Google referrers based on keywords you enter - i.e. if you want to show effectiveness of the search terms "Cheat", "I am stealing your money", "Look at me count the pounds" you can set those up. The referrals will have those keywords effectively making the referred traffic look more authentic
It can post to forms, store cookies, control the amount of traffic to show per hour
Updates automatically with new proxies daily so the list is constantly changing.
So what this means is the Googles, the Overtures, sites selling Media Space and everyone else making money off CPC or CPM are going to potentially have a problem if this becomes a mainstream worry in people’s minds. I imagine advertisers will be very weary of paying according to traffic levels or clicks, but will want to pay on some form of performance / conversion metric. This is feasible maybe for the very large players, but completely infeasible for the smaller players - there is no way Google or the likes would take the time or entertain the idea of earning money once a conversion has occurred.
I don’t know what the next step is then, but I imagine search companies and media space sellers will need to start making assurances that they are able to detect this traffic and ignore it. I would be interested to see if they really can - I don’t believe software such as I-Faker will leave a foot print that is easily detected. Maybe there is room for a new service which audits all traffic and removes all fake traffic by making sure it is always up to date with all the fake traffic generators globally - a mammoth task but I imagine could be done through some kind of collaboration between all the larger players in the market.
Matt
Lemon Foundation Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
Alex Chudnovsky
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
06 June 2004 13:36pm
On 22:44:19 5 June 2004 heskot04 wrote:
I assume that countrycheck.com can block those fake hits.
Not if they use proxy servers located in respectable countries such as UK/USA etc. These days a lot of people have unsecured 24/7 PCs on broadband connections, spammers already started targeting those machines to turn them into zombies used to spam, next logical step would be turn them into proxy servers used by click fakers.
£3-5 (GBP) in India should be sufficient to live very well whole day or possibly even longer. At 10% cut this means that a person will need to make 30-50 clicks, perfectly feasible even if done manually.
Founder / Director / Co-founder at easyBacklog / Aqueduct / Econsultancy
28 May 2004 10:16am
Well, here it is. Fake traffic that is close to indistinguishable from real traffic: I-Faker.
Forget India's secret army of online ad 'clickers' we now have professional software which does it for us, which is user friendly enough for any user to start faking their traffic and potentially making money, or wiping the profits of their competitors..
The software is pretty clever
So what this means is the Googles, the Overtures, sites selling Media Space and everyone else making money off CPC or CPM are going to potentially have a problem if this becomes a mainstream worry in people's minds. I imagine advertisers will be very weary of paying according to traffic levels or clicks, but will want to pay on some form of performance / conversion metric. This is feasible maybe for the very large players, but completely infeasible for the smaller players - there is no way Google or the likes would take the time or entertain the idea of earning money once a conversion has occurred.
I don't know what the next step is then, but I imagine search companies and media space sellers will need to start making assurances that they are able to detect this traffic and ignore it. I would be interested to see if they really can - I don't believe software such as I-Faker will leave a foot print that is easily detected. Maybe there is room for a new service which audits all traffic and removes all fake traffic by making sure it is always up to date with all the fake traffic generators globally - a mammoth task but I imagine could be done through some kind of collaboration between all the larger players in the market.
Matt
Lemon Foundation
Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
28 May 2004 11:08am
Companies like Google, Overture etc refuse to disclose their anti-fraud methods, perhaps justifiably but lets be honest here - they have serious conflict of interest, especially companies which derive majority of revenues from PPC activity.
I think there will be a big re-evaluation of pay-per-click activities ultimately concentrated on _real_ profits (confirmed shipped sales less fraud, returns etc) achieved by using various pay per click activities.
Naturally PPC providers won't like it because many of them will consider that its job of the target site to convert leads into sales. They might not like it, but at the end of the day "He who pays the piper calls the tune" - people pay more and more attention to ROI these days, so if clicks do not actually perform (based on confirmed orders, less returns, fraud etc), then a lot of activity will be abandoned.
Multi Media Developer at SportNetwork.net
30 May 2004 09:50am
I downloaded the trail on this yesterday and set it running on a test site while doing some surfing.
I've just had a look at the proccessed logs and if it wasn't for the stupid referers from google I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I had about 1800 page impressions and 550+ i.p. addresses in the space of about an hour.
This is worrying stuff and its cheap software under $100!
Can't see how it would increase the number of clicks though and thats not a discussion for here I know.
The CPA advertisers will be rubbing their hands with glee really and publishers like myself will lose out.
Don't know what can be done about this really...hide and hope it goes away? ;-)
Cheers
John Wards
SportNetwork.net
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
30 May 2004 14:47pm
> Don't know what can be done about this
> really...hide and hope it goes away? ;-)
i say cap your daily budget to ensure you won't lose it all
and patiently wait - it will happen, just a matter of time.
VP Operations & Marketing at Celebrus Limited
02 June 2004 09:37am
Perhaps this will finally get people to recognise that a mear banner click or click on the home page is not the basis on which to measure the success (or pay for) on-line advertising.
You are trying to attract people to the site who have more than a passing interest, or accidentally land on your site - you want interested people, who engage with your proposition and with which you can establish a longer-term (and hopefully profitable) relationship.
Our customers use our solutions to measure their campaigns ability to achieve that goal - and it is not hard... spending perhaps 10% of an on-line adverttising budget will provide solutions which can (and these are their words not mine) a 30% to 100% improvement in campaign performance and profitability.
So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers, and impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the people which a campaign delivers which make money or sence!
Multi Media Developer at SportNetwork.net
02 June 2004 09:46am
On 09:37:05 2 June 2004 Malcolm Duckett wrote:
>So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers, and
>impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the
>people which a campaign delivers which make money or sence!
I totaly agree with this Malcolm, but being a publisher I would ;-)
I still find it daft when an advert gets pulled from my site because its click rate is not very good...why would my loyal visitors who are on my site for a very good reason suddenly drop every thing to visit another site?
But they might make a mental note of the URL or the product even if they don't realise and go back later....
Its stupid to think that when someone is watching a tv programme, reading a paper or listening to the radio the suddenly stop what they are doing and go and wander round...Ikea...A car show room....A super market looking for that product etc
But we expect users to do it, why? Some of the blame has to be layed at the door of the agencies in the early days of the internet who persumed this and sold advertising to companies in the way..the great accountablity rubbsih.
HoHum.
John
Director of Product Development at Econsultancy
02 June 2004 10:25am
Absolutely John - we're about to publish a new report on rich media / interactive advertising and can only hope that the wider ad industry stops hiding behind click-through rates as a tangible way of measuring response.
Using clicks to gauge the performance of an ad campaign is crazy, when there are far better ways of measuring response. Interactions will become increasingly valuable, and ad formats that support and encourage - rather than demand - action on the part of the user are surely the way forward. The interactivity rate could become the de facto measurement standard in the coming years.
As you say, people do not watch a TV ad then rush down to their local shopping mall to buy the product. This has pretty much been the expectation of the banner ad. The majority of rich media formats have also demanded action on the part of the user, missing the point of these new formats entirely. So-called rich ads, such as overlays, require the user to click if he/she wants to continue reading the story. Many clicks can be attributed to users trying to get rid of these intrusive ads, as was the case with pop-ups.
More often than not, I find myself heading straight for the 'back' button, to find a substitute story. Now that news aggregators such as Google News are becoming a more popular way of surfing/searching for relevant content, first impressions seem to count for so much more. There are, after all, a bunch more stories available on other sites just two clicks away. Why suffer intrusive ads when you don't have to? Why ban pop-ups then allow overlays to ruin the user experience? And what are the additional benefits, in terms of measurement, that an overlay provides over and above the banner?
Best-in-breed rich formats are better for advertisers, who can measure a range of interactions and capture data without the user needing to navigate elsewhere. Which makes things better for the publisher. And since the user is in control of the ad, the user experience isn't savaged, so they are also better for consumers (who can respond, expand ads, enter personal data, watch videos, toggle sound on/off etc on their terms). The response - and the ability to measure this response - is said to be well worth the extra costs incurred in creating these ads.
The banner still has a part to play, in a kind of signposting role after the message has been delivered via TV/rich media/print, but let's hope those swinish overlays die an early death. Otherwise, 'rich media', in the eye of the user, might go the same way as the dreaded pop-up.
PS - I'd love to hear from anyone running rich media campaigns - we're looking for case studies and statistics to help back up some of these arguments. Contact me at to discuss.
c.
On 09:46:55 2 June 2004 John Wards wrote:
>On 09:37:05 2 June 2004 Malcolm Duckett wrote:
>>So let's stop counting clicks and hits and bouncers,
>and
>>impressions, and start looking for (and counting) the
>>people which a campaign delivers which make money or
>sence!
>
>I totaly agree with this Malcolm, but being a publisher I
>would ;-)
>
>I still find it daft when an advert gets pulled from my
>site because its click rate is not very good...why would
>my loyal visitors who are on my site for a very good
>reason suddenly drop every thing to visit another site?
>
>But they might make a mental note of the URL or the
>product even if they don't realise and go back later....
>
>Its stupid to think that when someone is watching a tv
>programme, reading a paper or listening to the radio the
>suddenly stop what they are doing and go and wander
>round...Ikea...A car show room....A super market looking
>for that product etc
>
>But we expect users to do it, why? Some of the blame has
>to be layed at the door of the agencies in the early days
>of the internet who persumed this and sold advertising to
>companies in the way..the great accountablity rubbsih.
>
>HoHum.
>John
employee at hes
05 June 2004 22:27pm
One of the main problems is surfers using anonymous proxies to increase their click-through payments in programs such as adsense. I sometimes question where my "hits" are coming from. I will be trying countrycheck.com
What are others using? At some stage this will become a serious problem.
On 11:08:35 28 May 2004 Alex Chudnovsky wrote:
employee at hes
05 June 2004 22:44pm
I assume that countrycheck.com can block those fake hits.
On 10:16:12 28 May 2004 matt wrote:
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
06 June 2004 13:36pm
On 22:44:19 5 June 2004 heskot04 wrote:
Not if they use proxy servers located in respectable countries such as UK/USA etc. These days a lot of people have unsecured 24/7 PCs on broadband connections, spammers already started targeting those machines to turn them into zombies used to spam, next logical step would be turn them into proxy servers used by click fakers.
£3-5 (GBP) in India should be sufficient to live very well whole day or possibly even longer. At 10% cut this means that a person will need to make 30-50 clicks, perfectly feasible even if done manually.