Google Making Reasonable Effort To Control Click-Fraud: Report

As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case - Lane’s Gifts v. Google, Google had agreed to have an independent expert examine click-fraud detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not Google have implemented reasonable measures to protect their advertisers.

The 47-page report, by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, today. It concludes that “Google’s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable”. He also explains the fundamental problem with automatically and algorithmically detecting click-fraud.

All the conceptual definitions of invalid clicks assume human intent. This means that none of these definitions can be operationalized in the sense that invalid click detection methods can be developed that would algorithmically identify invalid and only invalid clicks satisfying these definitions. This is the fundamental problem of invalid clicks that makes click fraud a difficult problem to solve.

In the absence of a conceptual operationalizable definition of invalid clicks, an alternative approach is to use operational definitions of invalid clicks that can be of the following form:

• Anomaly-based (or Deviation-from-the-norm-based). A click or a group of clicks is invalid if its behavior significantly deviates from the normal behavior, where normal behavior is established based on the average day-to-day activities.
• Rule-based. A click or a group of clicks is invalid if it satisfies certain conditions defined by human experts. These experts can be either local experts from Google or some global standardization committees that collectively develop rule-based standards of invalid clicks.
• Classifier-based. A click is invalid if a data mining classifier labels it as “invalid.” This labeling is done based on the past data about valid and invalid clicking activities used for “training” the classifier to decide which clicks are (in)valid.

via link

On Google’s method:

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.

I think we need a radical technological solution to the problem instead of best-effort approach Google is taking in order to completely eliminate click-fraud problems. I am playing with some ideas on this front. However even with their limitations Google AdWords provide the best ROI for most businesses.