Jon’s In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

The click fraud issue is nothing new. I’ve dealt with it in my work, often falling backwards in shock that Google didn’t detect the false clicks. One example was a client who books vacation rentals on a Pacific island. He went from 20 - 30 inquiries a day to 0 over the course of a couple of weeks. We finally figured out that literally 100s of clicks were done by a competitor who lives in a tiny town a couple of miles away from my client.

Google didn’t catch any of this - there were no red flags raised when this tiny town - on the same island - had 10 times the clicks of major cities like New York. I guess they thought my client had launched a very succesful marketing campaign aimed at getting locals who live 2 miles away - on an island - to rent vacation condos. They finally compensated the client, but not before putting up a fight.

Business Week has made click fraud their cover story in the new issue. Not a lot of new info for most of us, but it shows how mainstream this problem has become; and how far Google & Yahoo will go to downplay the issue. If you believe their PR you would think it was much ado about nothing. I beg to differ. Here’s the link to the story:

Business Week - Click Fraud Article

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