What is IGeryon?
IGeryon tracks the Internet's click fraud and provides anti-fraud education for Internet advertisers, and works with Law Enforcement and third parties to identify and pursue click and impression fraud worldwide. Click fraud occurs when someone clicks on a site, banner, or text ad for example, to manufacture and inflate impressions used for run of site advertising or clicks used for PPC or paid per click advertising. The advertiser is not getting what they paid for and not only suffers the direct costs of advertising dollars wasted, but opportunity costs as well where they could have benefited had that money been spent on legitimate advertising. Geryon is named for one of the antagonists in the 12 labors of Hercules. Geryon was also the monster in Dante's Inferno that symbolized Fraud who dwelled in the 8th level of Hell and like Fraud, Geryon's innocent face fools the onlooker long enough to be stung by his scorpion-like tail.
What is click fraud?
Click fraud can be defined as clicks made on an advertiser's web page or PPC ad with the intent of depleting the amount of money in the advertiser's account. This online advertising account can be with a search engine, interactive publication or affiliate network. A person or business committing click fraud is defined as individual(s) using manual or automated processes to generate clicks to a paid advertiser's online advertisement in order to deplete the advertisers PPC account and often to receive payment as well. Each time a link is clicked or page re-loaded, the advertiser is charged for that click, and often the person(s) doing the clicking are part of an affiliate network receiving a percentage of the monies paid by an advertiser to the search engine or interactive publication. The fact that the Internet is anonymous makes it easy for unscrupulous persons to commit click fraud. Click fraud is theft and no different than someone walking into your business or home and stealing from you. Click fraud may be as high as 60% and in some cases even more.
Who is involved in click fraud?
First there are the click fraud brokers or entities such as a search engines, online publications and online advertising syndicate networks. The click broker sells PPC advertising or impressions to advertisers who pay for impressions and clicks. These advertisers are the click fraud victims who purchase the PPC advertising from the click brokers. On the other side of this equation are the click fraud affiliates who intentionally click on the advertiser's PPC ads in order to earn a commission from the click broker (sometimes they are competitors of the advertiser). The click fraud affiliates click on the advertiser's ads and are typically compensated a % percentage of what the advertiser or click victim pays to the click broker. In other words, the click broker takes the advertiser's money and pays a percentage of it to the click fraud affiliate for clicking on the advertiser's ad. The click broker and click fraud affiliate benefit and the advertiser loses. The click fraud affiliate can click directly on the advertiser's ad as it appears on the click broker's site (the search engine URL for example) or they can be part of an affiliate network where the click broker feeds or syndicates the advertiser's links to a click fraud site set up by the click fraud affiliate. The click fraud affiliate then initiates the clicks from the click fraud site manually or by automation which is then electronically brokered by the click broker and the advertisers is charged for the click(s). Sometimes the click brokers are also the click affiliates. Finally, there are the click fraud mobsters. If you track and complain about click fraud do not be surprised if you are quickly contacted by person(s) claiming to be in the click protection business. There are legitimate companies that do but there are also lots of unscrupulous ones. Sometimes the click fraud affiliates have a side business where they offer “protection services” to combat the click fraud that they are committing. They do this because they know that if the fraud gets too bad, an advertiser may not be able to advertise at all and they stand to lose the click fraud affiliate revenue. So instead of losing all the revenue, they convert you into a customer who requires their protection services.
How does click fraud work?
It is pretty simple to understand. Let's say you are an advertiser and have a pay-per-click ad set up with a search engine or online publication and your keyword bid is $10 per click. Your key word might be “loans” for example. Each time someone clicks on your ad on the results page for that specific keyword - loans, your account is charged $10. If the amount of money in your account equals $10,000, you can have 1,000 clicks on your ad before the funds in your account are depleted. If a click affiliate decides to target your PPC ad either directly or by participating in a syndicated affiliate network where your ad is syndicated and fed to a website specifically designed to engage in click fraud, they can use various methods to click your ad repeatedly until your $10,000 is gone. This can happen quickly or over a longer period depending on what method is used to generate the click fraud. There are millions of syndicated affiliate websites on the Internet that serve no purpose except to manufacture clicks.
Can you compare click fraud to something familiar?
Imagine a retail store that hires a marketing firm to send prospects into its store. The retailer has a turn style and knows how many people enter the store each day. They can calculate the total dollar amount of sales for that day, divide it by the number of store visitors and determine how much each person spends on average. Let's say that for each person the retailer calculates they will earn $100 in sales revenue. They agree to pay a marketing firm to refer people into their store and pay a fee of $10 for each person entering the store referred by the marketing company. The marketing company then allows one of the store’s competitors or hires individuals to pass in and out of the store over and over with no intention of purchasing anything. In the latter case, they might even pay the individuals (click affiliates) 20% or $2 for every time the turn style goes around.
What are the sources of click fraud?
Click fraud ranges from simple manual clicking to the use of software that automates the process. There are hundreds of applications available to automate click fraud. Click fraud can come from affiliate networks, competitors, blogs, spam email embedded with syndicated ads or someone simply clicking on your ad, over and over. The clicks can be manufactured with a client PC or by servers, often anonymous proxy servers that are typically blacklisted by most ISPs on the RBL. The click broker pays the click affiliates for clicks that it syndicates to the click affiliates website. The essential problem is that a click broker cannot really represent a click advertiser and an affiliate at the same time because the click broker benefits from both the advertiser’s payments which are generated by click affiliates to whom they pay a percentage of what the advertisers pay them each time they sell or broker a click. Just as an attorney cannot represent a plaintiff and defendant at the same time, a click broker cannot represent an advertiser and affiliate at the same time.
