Andy Sweet

I’ve been a click fraud hound for many years now.  People that know me closely will tell you that I tend to obsess over this stuff.  Yahoo has been a thorn in my side since I started because their traffic quality plummeted after they lost MSN and started filling in with no-name search partners and parked sites.  Click fraud is actually what first led me to my interest in domains and learning about that whole world.  I learned that not every domain parker is involved in click fraud, but they’re sure getting a black eye from it by not speaking out more against it.  It surprises me that they don’t do more to protect their golden goose.  But I digress…

Last night I set up a new campaign in Yahoo.  First time in a long time because of my bad experiences with them.  But, I figured it would be as bad now that I’m bidding on MUCH less expensive terms.  WRONG-O!  The following is what I learned from a 50 click test.

I loaded thousands of geo-specific terms.  Los Angeles (keyword), Montana (keyword), Tuscaloosa (keyword).  You get the point.  I turned it on around 10:45 PM.  Using Yahoo’s close-to-real-time reporting I watched the clicks adding up.  I was seeing CTR over 75%.  When I got close to 50 clicks, I paused the campaign and went in to my logs to check the clicks.  I took the IP addresses and ran them against a geo-location database.  I wish I could say I was shocked by the results. 

Now, what someone in West Virginia is doing looking for a Chicago (keyword) is beyond me.  Sure, it could happen.  But not 99% of the time like occurs above.  This is one of those things where taken at face value maybe wouldn’t look like bogus traffic.  Yahoo certainly didn’t seem to have a problem with it as they charged me for all of them.

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