What are the giveaways that make click-fraud detectable?
Tom Cuthbert Click Forensics Forbes: You say that click fraud is increasing, while Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder says that click fraud is under control. Are you accusing Google of hiding the extent of the problem? Cuthbert: You’ll notice in your Q&A with Shuman that he doesn’t actually answer the question of whether click fraud is getting worse. That’s because he knows from Google’s own data that the problem of click fraud is getting worse and will continue to get worse. Are your estimates inflated by “fictitious clicks”–clicks that Google doesn’t count? In our analysis, we use Google Click ID, a tool that matches our data back to Google’s. A Google Click ID simply provides a tag, a random number that Google adds to each individual click that comes in through Adsense or Adwords. An advertiser can enable a setting so that third parties can also see and use that number to tie back those individual clicks to Google’s data. That way, advertisers who submit invalid clicks are able to ident
