July 23rd, 2010

What the Click?!?

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

Last Friday I checked in on the performance of our AdWords ads and things seemed to be going well. There was even a gentle increase in the total number of clicks. When I checked back in on AdWords this Monday the number of daily clicks had more than doubled!

Hooray, right?

Not so fast.

Driving traffic to your site is not just an issue of quantity. Even people casting the widest nets still want to know (or SHOULD want to know) how the traffic is performing. So I went to Google Analytics to start with the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate tells you how many people made it past the first page of your site. It is a good first indicator that the traffic that you’re getting to your site is valuable.

And this is where the mystery began.

The traffic wasn’t there. AdWords showed 20 clicks on July 17th, and 25 on the 18th. Google Analytics? 7 and 12 visits respectively. Clearly something was wrong here.

It turns out that most of our clicks were coming from Google’s Display Network, and mostly through what shows up in the reporting as “AdSenseForMobileApps.com”, which is how Google reports ads that were displayed on mobile devices inside of apps. Sadly for us, the apps that were the biggest click generators (by far) have all been suspected of click fraud in one forum or another. Click fraud is when a site (or app in this case) generates clicks as Google AdWords would define them, but doesn’t actually send real traffic to the site that paid for the ad.

Fortunately, Google tries to keep on top of this, and there’s even a report (if you dig for it) that will show you how many clicks Google thinks were invalid and that it didn’t charge you for. They also seem pretty open to you reporting times when you think there is fraud, and crediting you back for disputed clicks.

For our campaign, however, the problem is more than a monetary one (since we’re working on free ads in the first place); they’ve destroyed our data. This issue calls into question much of the data that we’ve been gathering, since we can’t tell for certain how long we’ve been getting fake clicks. Since there’s no easy way to see what ads were served because of which keywords onto which placements, it makes it near impossible for us to determine if ads that we thought were high performing actually were, or were just lost into the honey pot.

So, what to do?

In AdWords, you can exclude sites from carrying your ads. You can even do this on an individual app or URL basis. For us, we excluded the entire AdSenseForMobileApps.com category, because not only do we have a data problem, but we also now have a trust issue. We can’t be sure what is a valid source of traffic from apps, so we’re shutting them all down. It means starting over with our data, but it may at least mean we have clean data.

It’s been a couple of days since we shut down the apps (we put a halt to it on Monday the 19th). What was the effect?

Clearly we have some work to do.