Click-through fraud is a multi-faceted issue, it costs ALL advertisers, calls Google, and, ultimately, legalizes the publishers of lost revenue. Anyone who has worked in law and crime prevention in the brick and mortar world can tell you that public participation in police efforts is one of the most effective ways to prevent crime. As a community of relevant web publishers and advertisers, we can take our cue from the most effective crime and mud crime prevention strategies in the world. See how many cities have cleaned up their streets to see how those efforts can translate into the online world and PPC advertising.
Step I: Hold Open Public Sites
The first step in any police community effort is open communication between law enforcement and the public. Bringing everyone together allows them to share and define common goals, and develop strategies to meet them. An open forum for advertisers, publishers and providers will create a public sense and promote disclosure of methods, metrics and strategies. By opening a discussion to get feedback from all stakeholders, the community can raise concerns and share solutions.
Open dialogue also encourages another type of interaction that has been proven to enhance the effectiveness of community policing: dialogue. When you put together a lot of ideas, solutions emerge that no one working alone could think of. Those solutions include new features based on existing strategies. This is the foundation of open source software communities, and should be the foundation for creating software aimed at detecting, preventing and eliminating click-through-source fraud.
Step II: Increasing Police Intelligence
In the ‘real world’, police departments increase police presence in the community by deploying more police officers in troubled areas, establishing community service stations and improving community relations. In the online world, community policing has to deal with a different face. There are no roads, no nearby places or little guard bets. Instead, each store owner is responsible for protecting his or her property. And there is the brushing: protection is only as good as the amount of owner and economic information.
The fraud solution community solution includes free, transparent and easy-to-measure fraud fraud software. By keeping conversations open to the public through the forum, developers can build add-ons to existing software and make them freely available to increase the potential of the entire community to protect themselves.
Step III: Educate the Community and Inform the Wrongdoers.
Believe it or not, one of the most effective crime prevention strategies in the world is to publicize the presence of public guards. The efforts of the community police to make a lot of noise are an effective deterrent to real-world crime.
The community-based fraud prevention platform serves as a central distribution of data on click-through fraud, its scope and new methods used for fraud and anti-fraud. One of the most obvious examples of how this type of community works is in the virus environment, where many high-tech communities monitor the progress of new viral infections and cooperate in ways to get rid of infected computers.
Back in 1999, a new virus came to the internet that frustrated users and their efforts were thwarted as software reinstalled itself over and over again. The first mention of the virus hit the tech community boards at 5 AM EST. At 7 AM, two hours later, there were dozens of users around the world working on the solution - about three hours before major commercial virus protection companies sent out a warning. By 8:30 AM, an open community forum had divided the solution into pieces and pieces, and working effectively with each other, had sent a practical solution to remove the virus from infected computers.
Think of that kind of power and support to identify, differentiate and fight new ways with click builders.
Step IV: Use the Power of Numbers to Bring Change
It is powerful in numbers and network. At the moment, PPC engines rely on first-click filtering to remove fake clicks before they are paid. They respond to refund requests if the advertiser proves his or her fraudulent click claim. By using public power, advertisers and publishers can:
- Share click-tracking tricks that go beyond the first click analysis.
- Support each other's efforts when you want a refund by sharing data to help establish the trend / pattern and make the evidence more visible
- Seek to be more transparent and accountable to search engines and PPC providers. This will allow advertisers AND publishers to monitor their sites more effectively and report to PPC search engines on the effectiveness of filtering efforts.
By sharing information and support, we can make a difference and incur significant losses due to click-through fraud. Click Sentinel is designed to help empower the community. Click Sentinel community is more than just software - a plan and infrastructure designed to promote, support and expand the community and suppress fraud by clicking where you can not fight back.
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