Logging Clicks to Detect Click Fraud
AffTrack – Insurance Against Click Fraud
AffTrack is a free GPL php script to help track outgoing affiliate clicks and incoming pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Click fraud is not just people like the Texas-based company in this article that created web sites specifically designed to generate false clicks on your PPC ads. It’s also affiliate programs that incorrectly credit clicks and rob you of your rightful share of revenue. Logging your incoming or outgoing clicks gives you information you can use to protect yourself against click fraud.
When a url pointing to Afftrack is loaded, basic information about that click is logged and the browser is redirected to the url that displays your landing page or to the tracking url for an affiliate program.
AffTrack itself doesn’t detect click fraud.
The logs created by AffTrack give you information to analyze so you can decide if clicks on your account are fraudulent. Once you have logs to examine, cases of click fraud could be obvious, like the one documented here at WebMaster World.
I do a little bit of Google Adwords advertising and I sell a few books through Amazon’s affiliate program. I’ve been logging clicks for both. I know that my Amazon links are formatted correctly and showing up in my affiliate reports. And I know that every now and then, there’s a few clicks from Google that are a little fishy, but nothing I’ve felt a need to report yet. (Reporting every instance of suspected click fraud is probably a wiser policy.) The point is that I know this because I’ve been logging clicks.
Log files created by AffTrack default to a comma separated value format that is best viewed by importing the log into a database or spreadsheet for analysis. I use OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet to examine my log files. The filter options are especially useful.
I agree with Traffick that Google is in trouble unless they improve their AdSense/AdWords programs. These recent articles at Newsweek and Money magazine make it obvious that Google is concerned about click fraud.
This comment at Searchblog has a good point that programs should provide more information about what specific clicks are charged/credited. The place for click fraud detection is as close to the source a possible. Which means that Google should be making more progress in detecting fraudulent clicks themselves.
Download AffTrack01beta.zip