
Inside Google's Secret War Against Ad Fraud - prostoalex
http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-ad-fraud/298652/
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ChuckMcM
They make it sound a lot sexier than it is. When Blekko was serving up search
pages we had over 200,000 machines at any given time identified as
botnet/fraud sources. Perhaps it was because we were providing search results
to "tier n" search portals that we got to see more of the folks trying to scam
the advertisers but we got really really good at not serving up ads or
counting clicks on robots. Something ad publishers really appreciated.

If you're serving up SERPs there are lots of interesting things you can do,
like make white space clickable but not go anywhere, (humans click on the ads,
bots click on the giant click box.) Serve up an invisible "first ad" on the
top left, center, and right of the page. Tons of these robots just click the
top ad they think they find. When IP's in europe, brazil, mexico and the
Ukraine all search for the exact same english string and always click on the
third ad down, well you can just put all of that addresses in the equivalent
of an Ad "virtual kingdom" (they think they click but they don't go anywhere
useful).

Lots of funny stories, my favorite was sending Google traffic to Google ads
and having Google tell us it was fraudulent traffic. That was pretty funny.

~~~
cromwellian
My guess is, given the scale, and amount of money on the line, the attacks
against Google are far more sophisticated than just bots blindly clicking on
ads.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I would hope so! But even a place like Ask.com is clearly a couple million
dollars a day in ad revenue.

~~~
sanswork
I wrote an ad system that was in part used to backfill Ask in a few countries
and even with just backfill I was amazed at how much traffic they were still
doing. Though I'm pretty sure most of it was toolbar traffic.

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sprw121
I work in adtech, specifically on the bidding side on real-time click
forecasting and ad-pricing.

I have to say that compared to other ad exchanges. AdX (google's ad exchange)
is far and ways ahead of any other ad exchange in minimizing the the amount of
fraudulent traffic that we as ad buyers get exposed to. I did them serious
props.

~~~
enjoylife
Besides the obvious scale differences, what have you seen to be big
differentiators between google and other ad exchanges?

~~~
asdf99
also being an volume ad middle man in the industry, I can bet what the top
comment was referring was price.

adx is the cheapest, because it's the worse. your ad will be seen by users in
spots previously occupied by "the banks hate this guy" kind of click bait ads.
which have ridiculous ctr!

everyone I run experiments there I keep getting calls from clients to take
their ads out of some and some sites before brand sees it. it's a nightmare.

~~~
sprw121
No, not price, although they are pretty cheap and run a fair auction system
(unlikely other exchanges...looking at you facebook/appnexus). The CTR on adx
is actually one of the better ones, and they tend to have less junk inventory.

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shabble
I'm reminded of 'Google Will Eat Itself'[1], which purportedly used this
technique to purchase stock in Google, and also pay for additional ad-clicks,
with the goal of buying out Google entirely from received ad revenue.

I don't know (or really believe) that it ever actually operated in the way
described though. More of an art/thought project.

[1]
[http://www.gwei.org/pages/diagram/diagram.html](http://www.gwei.org/pages/diagram/diagram.html)

~~~
ovi256
I remember when that was published and commenters laughed at it. I
specifically remember a sophisticated explanation about how GWEI would never
work because the second derivative of their GOOG would never something or
another.

Today GWEI owns $400k in GOOG.

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just_observing
"Sasha and a number of his fellow Google employees asked to be referred to by
their first names, saying they were concerned for their safety”

"The rapport between original team members and their new peers was apparent as
the crew gathered at the Craft Beer Co., a homey London pub"

and they show a picture of some of the team.

Not too worried then.

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z3t4
Guess how many out of 1000 visitors from my last AdWords Content Campaign
loaded the favicon.ico ? And how many of them do you think signed up to to my
service!?

Answer: 0/1000 (nada, zero)

Adwords for search worked much better though (real users).

I also tried Google ad-sense for some of my websites, but the quality of ads
are very bad and no-one clicks on them.

Around ten years ago, Google ads used to be "the shit" (everyone used it) and
you where able to both earn money and get quality traffic. Have the publishers
turned to other market places or is my current experience what the world wide
web ad market looks like today!?

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kevin_thibedeau
I wish they would get off their butts and wage war against the referral spam
problem that has made analytics useless for low traffic sites. The current
filter system is not good enough to combat them. They need to provide a
special filter with a curated blacklist that automatically removes all past
data logged from the spam sites.

~~~
Scoundreller
I would say Google's move toward HTTPS by default made analytics useless. You
can't tell what search terms were used to arrive at your site.

For my low-traffic sites, I would mine them by hand to figure out what people
really wanted, and then develop content around that. I don't understand why
Google would not want to incentivize that.

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asdf99
Google removed itself from the IAB's working group on safe frame, which fought
for user and publisher safety. among things like preventing the ad from
knowing what's on the page it's served on it also handle if the ad is in view,
preventing most of those bot net traffic that uses 1x1 iframes or insert ads
with low zindex on the page. the only vulnerabilities left with safeframes are
giving the user a executable when they click on the ads (nothing can prevent
that) and flash exploits (although the most common exploits are blocked fine,
it's still vulnerable when it's a full control bug in flash)

but Google got out when they realized it wouldn't give as much info from its
adsense network of third party sites as they are used to with insecure adwords
(when it shows display ads)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Google's ad network relies on knowing about the page the ad is embedded in
both for targeting (AdSense) and apparently fraud prevention.

~~~
asdf99
exactly. it is a trade off. user privacy vs price on expanding inventory. they
choose the later

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filereaper
It looks like taking down botnets is important to all search engines, here's a
old news article about Bing taking down a botnet[0].

Similar to Bing, does Google also pursue and do an actual takedown of these
botnets? Most of the article was about showing off how nasty these exploits
are, nothing about taking them down.

[0] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/huge-zeroaccess-botnet-
dis...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/huge-zeroaccess-botnet-disrupted-by-
microsoft-1.2453707)

------
kefs
WinLister, from the article..

[http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/winlister.html](http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/winlister.html)

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yvoschaap2
To me this reads as one big Google propaganda ad (by inviting a journalist).

~~~
CodingGuy
Google style - like they do it with their webspam team.

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downandout
I'm not sure why the criminals are bothering. AdSense clicks earn almost
nothing in my experience. I guess they could be making money by charging
businesses to click on their competitors' ads and drain their budgets, but
there are only so many companies that are willing to pay to engage in clearly
illegal activity like that. The primary beneficiary of the fraudulent clicks
that are good enough to evade Google's detection is....Google.

~~~
cldellow
Your experience is not universal. :)

There are ways to make clicks worth more. Be from a US IP address. Stuff your
browser with retargeting cookies by visiting high-value brand sites (e.g. car
manufacturers, insurance websites, loan products, ecommerce stores).

I've worked on the network side of ad ops and seen fraud. Amateur, easily
detected and squelched fraud. It amounted to several thousand dollars a day.
If you were the right combination of talented and not-overly-greedy, you could
make a comfortable living by doing this fraudulently.

> The primary beneficiary of the fraudulent clicks that are good enough to
> evade Google's detection is....Google.

The primary beneficiary is the person getting the lion's share of the ad
dollar, which often isn't Google. Don't get me wrong, Google has some perverse
incentives here, too, but I suspect they'd be way more happy with a 0% fraud
world than with the status quo.

~~~
Nitramp
If you don't provide value to your customers (Advertisers) due to fraudulent
clicks, ultimately your product is less valuable, and you make less money. I
think Google's incentives are alright here.

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bootload
_" Thanks to Google's massive size, the blueprint can then be overlaid on top
of Google's wealth of impression data to find chunks of traffic that match
up."_

    
    
        'z00clicker vs. normal click density' 
    

Any idea how/where the *normal click density described is sourced from?

~~~
shabble
Maybe they have a sample user group who are equipped with some keyboard/mouse
logging type system that can report to them?

They could even do it to all (or some subset) of visitors via Google
Analytics[1] to report the (x,y) position when click occurs. It wouldn't
surprise me if an awful lot of the internal use of GA is for ad-fraud
detection.

I recall way back in the day some ad networks were using imagemaps[2] instead
of plain links because they'd report an (x,y) postition relative to the image,
and could probably filter out the really dumb clickbots that would hit the
precise pixel centre of the element every time.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map)

~~~
bootload
_" They could even do it to all (or some subset) of visitors via Google
Analytics[1] to report the (x,y) position when click occurs. It wouldn't
surprise me if an awful lot of the internal use of GA is for ad-fraud
detection."_

This is what I'd suspected, randomised sampling.

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ksk
While fraud of any kind is certainly bad, I don't particularly feel enthused
about cheering for the advertising industry as the "good guys".

