Is Fraud Rampant on Google's Content Ad Network? Shocking Results and What You Need to Do to Protect Yourself

I have to admit that I am both baffled and shocked by the data I am going to share with you.  On June 1st, 2007 Google started to roll out their “Placement Reports” that give every AdWords advertiser an inside look into Google’s content ad network. 

With Google’s new Placement Report you can take a detailed look under the hood to see just exactly what domains your ads are appearing on and more importantly, you can now track the click-through-rate by domain and via Google’s Site Exclusion tool you can exclude all of the underperforming sites to optimize your ROI for Google’s content ads.

However, what is even more shocking is that a lot of the data that Google reveals just does not make any sense. 

I can only come up with two explanations, both would be shocking:

• Either the data that Google is showing is wrong and misleading
• Or the data is demonstrating that there is massive click-fraud across Google’s content network

Let me present to you what I have discovered:

Observation 1: The average click-through-rate of Google AdSense ads tends to be between 0.25-5.0% per page. 

We run several blogs and sites such as www.blinklist.com and we are a heavy user of Google AdSense and this is the normal click-through-rate that we have experienced.  Please note that this is the click-through-rate for ALL Google AdSense ads.  Assuming at lest 1 major ad block with 4 ads, the click-through-rate per ad (advertiser) would be a fraction of the above. 

NOTE: There are most certainly bloggers and especially made for AdSense sites that get a higher click-through-rate but for high quality content sites the above stats should hold.

So, on Google’s Placement Reports, I would expect to see a click-through-rate between 0.00 – 1.00% for most of the domains.  Granted, once in a while I might see a CTR of 100% if there was only 1 impression and that user happened to click on my ad but that should be the exception and not the norm.

However, please take a look at the actual distribution and click-through-rate that I noticed (see image below)

This states that:

• The click-through-rate of our ads was 100% on 19.7% of the domains.  In other words, on 425 of 2,159 domains that our ads appeared on the click-through-rate was 100%!
• On another 11.6% of all the domains that our ads appeared on, the CTR of our ads was over 50%!
• Only 20% of the domains had a CTRof 20%

The above data is just outrageous!  How can the CTR be 100% on 425 domains and 0% on 433 domains?  That just does not add up. 

True, for the domains where our CTR was 100%, we only got about 1 impression but that is besides the point.  The point is that it should be virtually impossible to have as many domains with a CTR of 100% as one with 0%.  Why?  Because the average click-through-rate of Google AdSense ads is only about 0.25-5% per page for all advertisers! 

On Google’s defense, the conversion rate of the ads where our CTR was above 10% was still very good but I still cannot make sense of the data.  The only other explanation I have is that Google does not want to reveal who is using its content network and so it is not showing all of the other domains where our ads appeared on and our click-through-rate was 0%.

What are your thoughts?

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