So Many Clicks, So Few Sales

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Fortunately, there are alternatives to taking legal action. There are a number of click fraud auditing tools available—including Click Lab, Click Defense, and Click Detective—that are designed to alert you to suspicious clicks. The cost can range from $29.95 to several thousand dollars a month, depending on the amount of traffic your site receives. Or you could hire a consultant like Stricchiola to analyze your traffic and broker a deal with the search engines. But Stricchiola, who charges between $250 and $450 an hour, warns that it often costs more in time and money to identify the problem than is actually lost to click fraud. There are also alternative search engines, such as Brooklyn-based BlowSearch, which guarantees that its advertisers will not receive any automated clicks on their ads—or they’ll get their money back. Of course, BlowSearch gets only a tiny fraction of the traffic of the big search engines and offers less bang for the advertising buck.

In the end, you may have little option but to accept fraudulent clicks as a cost of doing business and recalculate your expected advertising ROI accordingly. That’s what Karaoke Star is doing. Of course, it’s also reserving the right to sue.

Sidebar: War of the Words

What does it say about our culture when the priciest Internet keywords involve hair removal, drug rehab, and bad credit? Here are some of the Web’s most coveted keywords and their average and maximum cost per click paid by advertisers for top position on search engines, courtesy of Googlest.com, a site that tracks advertising on Google.

Resources

The consulting firm Clickrisk has a “5-Minute Click Fraud Guide” at clickfraud.com. Searchenginewatch.com is full of tips for search-engine advertisers.

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