| Sabotaging Google AdWords |
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| Written by Editor |
| Sunday, 06 February 2005 03:00 |
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The ‘attack’ plays on how Google display the adverts based on the relevancy of these keywords. When a page with AdWords adverts on is displayed Google tracks the display and if the advert was clicked on. Then this is put into a relevancy calculation, if the advert is not clicked on over time the advert selection engine starts to select other adverts in preference as it ‘thinks’ the displayed advert is no longer relevant. The potential attack is simple, make numerous requests to pages with adverts on or make specific queries to the Google search engine, and ‘displaying’ the advert. But do not ‘click’ the advert. If this is repeated over and over these requests will introduce a negative bias against the display of the advert, which would result in eventually Google no longer serving up an advert. As a result it maybe possible to seriously damage an advertising campaigns effectiveness by artificially inflating the number of times an advert is displayed but not clicked on. Google have not made any comment on this potential issue. Clickrisk commented that the best way to counteract this issue is to monitor click-through vs. display rates to see if the campaign has been targeted. If it has then the only option is to cancel the campaign and launch a new one. You can see more on this issue in the Clickrisk advisory here. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites          |
| Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 September 2006 23:17 ) |