msdanielle - just another ego blog site

Over the course of the past few months, my AdBrite network campaigns have been inundated with an exponential number of fraudulent clicks — that my company has to pay for. Luckily, I have a dedicated rep who helps me monitor and control my campaigns and has assigned another of his team members to locate these fraud clicks for two of my campaigns in particular. But between these two campaigns, which I have set at a fairly low daily amount, I’ll be getting back well over $400 collectively for May (they’re still investigating though, so it might be a lot more). As far as I know, though, you have to spend a decent amount monthly in order to get a dedicated rep, especially one who’ll get you your money back! So why the increase of fraud all of a sudden?

Our guess (that is, between my rep and myself) is that publishers are now gaming AdBrite. When a publisher sets up an account with AdBrite, they have the option to immediately show network cpc ads on their site(s) — ads that advertisers have chosen to run in a particular channel within AdBrite. But publishers have to be manually approved by the sales team to display flat-rate ads. For instance, I can choose to run an ad campaign in the Sports category, and any publisher who signs up with AdBrite can categorize themselves in the Sports category and start displaying my ads right away. Then they can create a script to click on the ads, or tell their other sneaky publisher friends, “Hey, come click on all my ads for me!” This isn’t very nice.

In the picture, you can see one of my ads received 84 clicks out of 355 impressions. Not even on my best days can I get that high of a click-through rate (CTR). It’s almost 24%! That site’s already been pulled from AdBrite — I checked. And the one above it that got 1.773% CTR is a spam site — I checked that one too. Between just these two listings, that’s 170 fraud clicks and zero conversions. You can do the calculations to find out how many clicks I’m getting credited back for if it’s $400+ and counting. (But if you can’t, it’s $400/$.09 per click = 4,444 clicks) Bastards!

The problem I have is that even if I pause a publisher from reaping clicks from me in one campaign, I can’t stop them from weaseling clicks out of me in my other campaigns across the board. I just have to manually remove them when I see them pop up. What a drag!

I guess this is sort of my rant post about when publishers find out they can game a system like AdBrite. AdBrite’s one of the largest third-party ad networks, but they still don’t have a handle on this problem. I personally don’t think publishers should sign up and take advantage of advertisers like this because in the end, they’re only creating a headache for the advertisers as well as AdBrite, and their revenue won’t be honored anyway. Plain and simple, it’s stealing. I hope AdBrite figures this out and just removes the option for publishers to immediately start earning money on network ads. They should follow Google’s lead (I can’t believe I just said that) and display PSA’s until the publisher is approved for both flat-rate ads and network ads.

Disclaimer: This has been a rant by your friend MsDanielle.

[If you enjoy reading MsDanielle.com, please feel free to subscribe via RSS or get free email updates.]

Check out these related articles:

• AdBrite to Offer CPC Banner Ad Placements
• Friday Funny - For Geeks!
• PPC Tools
• Tips on Buying Flat-Rate Text Ads