26
July
2006
|
03:03 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Google shines light on click fraud, decison on settlement due this week

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com



Even as a judge prepares to decide whether to enforce a $90 million settlement against Google for a class-action lawsuit, Google announced moves to shine some light on their click fraud suspicions. The Mercury reports that will tell advertisers how many clicks have been deemed invalid each day for advertising campaigns they run on Google.

Google will start giving advertisers an estimate of the number and percentage of invalid clicks over a day, week, quarter and year, the Chronicle reported.

``This gives them the data that shows that Google is doing what we say we have been doing,'' Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust and safety, told the Mercury. What Google says they have been doing is using sophisticated software to filter out the vast majority of fraudulent clicks.

On the official Adwords blog, available here) concludes that Google's efforts at stopping click fraud are "reasonable." While the report says that Google is doing a lot to deal with the problem, as much as anyone, there are hard limits to a technological solution. Danny Sullivan points out:


Between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks, lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.


Google's offered settlement is being criticized by 40 of the plaintiffs as ipoorly calculated and unfair. According to the National Law Journal:

Under the settlement, class members who contributed 10 percent of Google's billions of dollars in revenue by paying for fraudulent clicks would receive compensation based on only 10 percent of the $60 million fund, or $6 million, he said in court papers. Such an undervalued settlement is "unprecedented," [said a lawyer representing two of the objectors.]