PPC Click tracking with Google Ad Tagging

Matt Cutts has a very good post on his blog about PPC tracking and the discrepancies that can arise as a result of third party web log analysis. In particular with reference to a document by Shuman Ghosemajumder (links as follows):

• Why Third-Party Click Fraud Estimates Don’t Add Up
  
• Why Third-Party Click Fraud Estimates Don’t Add Up - Part 2

In the article Shuman says:

“Here`s the problem: web logs, whether generated by an advertisers, or by third-party code on an advertiser`s site, cannot directly track ad clicks. Instead, they track visits to a special landing page URL on the advertiser`s site (e.g. http://example.com/?adwords ) as a proxy for how many ad clicks occurred. The assumption they`re relying upon is that each visit to that URL corresponds to a unique click, and vice versa. But in practice this is not the case. Once a user visits that page, they often browse through the site, navigating through sub pages, and then return to the original landing page by hitting the back button. When the landing page is reloaded in the browser, it appears in the web log as though additional ad clicks are occurring. Google can count ad clicks reliably as a click on a Google ad will cause the web browser to contact Google and then we redirect it to the advertiser`s landing page. A reload of the advertiser`s landing does not contact Google again. In addition, the referrer URL which is passed by the browser when users hit the back button is actually the original referrer URL (which says the page came from an ad click) which gets cached, so there is no analysis which can be done based on logs alone which can resolve this. This is where the fictitious clicks come from.

So is there a solution to this? Yes. Third-party analytics (not click fraud) firms have been aware of the page reload issue for many years, and generally use redirects (rather than web log based tracking) to avoid it. If one is tied to using web site logs (or landing page code generating logs) however, the only solution is to use the AdWords auto-tagging feature. Auto-tagging has been available since 2005, and is a feature which appends a unique ID to the landing page URL for every click, so that the cases of (a) multiple clicks and (b) multiple reloads of the landing page can be easily distinguished.”

However having hyper-analysed the performance of one of our major clients, a debt management company here in the UK, I have to question some of the points made. At some points today, the click:impressions ratio was 2:1 in the clicks favour, all chargeable by Google. Surely this is something that could be very easily sorted by a quick cookie reference prior to forwarding to the site, instead of recharging the advertiser.

This is something that Google really should be looking at, whilst no other online medium flexibility that PPC on the whole does, no other channel online is as easily manipulated as PPC, not just Google (we have had even worse problems with the current Yahoo platform on certain terms.

To see Matt Cutts full blog post, click here

Add comment February 5th, 2007