ClickTracks (& John Marshall) is awesome, but I need to disagree

I’ll tell you the end of the story first. “There’s a certain amount that advertisers MUST do… (they) should be looking at the data.” John Marshall, ClickTracks president, recently said this in an interview with WebProNews, and although we haven’t made much progress with our click fraud situation, I suppose it means something that we are at least looking at the data. We’re not using John’s ClickTracks, but instead Adwatcher, a company I’m still holding out hope for because they’ve promised me that their next update will help me make some progress with Google.

I wanted to talk about this interview with John. First, I met him at a Webmaster World conference here in New Orleans a couple of years ago and found him to be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. However, I would disagree with his analysis of click fraud. He says there are basically 2 types: childish competitors and site owner spammers.

Childish competitors are those that click on your ads until your budget runs out. Site owner spammers are those slippery agents that put up a site, redirect a ton of traffic to it, earn a bunch of money and bring it back down before the search engine can find them. John says that the first type is the rarer of the 2, implying that it’s not as much of a problem as the second, but I would disagree.

While I would agree that overall, on site content ad spamming is a massive problem, I am convinced that we are being plagued by childish competitors. John says that site owner spamming is the bigger problem because spammers will always follow the money, but I think by putting me out of business by clicking on my ad is a form of following the money.

The topic of search engines not having much of an incentive to combat click fraud came up, and John handled it like a pro. He said that it is something that search engines want to get rid of, but is realistic enough to say that “Even though it’s an unpopular theory, Marshall believes that no fully automated system will ever succeed.”

Adwatcher said that I should expect an update right after Christmas. If that doesn’t work, then maybe we’ll try ClickTracks. If that doesn’t work…