Click Fraud Check - How, My Next project - how to proceed? Options

[Aji]

Hi all,

My professor has asked me to submit a paper on click frauds. How to identify it?

I thought it is quite easy but after few days of work I can smell the difficulty level.

My Question is how can I identify a person surfing the site? Say my professor has a blog (widget.blogspot.com). He is doing some PPC marketing and paying as high as $2 pc.

Say his ads appears at
1) Google
2) Overture
3) Yahoo

when some come from these sites these are the possible parameters I can store

1) user IP
2) user OS
3) user Browser Type
4) unique ID no (using cookie or sessions)
5) Screen Resolution
6) screen color settings

(do we other parameters assosiated with user's identity)

Now say person X visits the blog through Google , after some time another person visits the blog through Overture. How do I check whether it is Person X or not?

Few possible ways are
1) If I make a cookie with some UID which can be rechecked, this can be almost 100% check. This will fail only if one machine is used by many others in case of internet cafes. but still its very a possibility.

2) Using IP (but many people can share the same IP) , so IP+resolution+browser+....(other parmeters) will help me check for person X.

My Questions
1) what are the other ways to check and identify the person for click frauds?
2) How to detect abusers coming from proxy servers? Also how to detect AOL, prodigy and dial-up abusers?

Other Issue
I cannt use php on blogspot , so I am using our university website to provide the basic php and DB support. I am using Js for that.

I real appreciate for your time and help.

Thanks
Aji

[Randy]

No, it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but you can detect all kinds of things if you want to Aji. PHPsniff is a Source Forge project that would probably be a good place to start.

There are a few places out there which have already build click fraud detectors. All of those I've seen have Pay services, but if they have a trial you may be able to glean some information as to how they're doing it. One such that I know of is Clicklab.com

[Aji]

Thanks Randy

it's not the easiest thing in the world to do

After few weeks of study I will have to agree with you, I am trying to study the behaviour patterns too.

I will go through the other sites.

Thanks again
Age

Your suggestions will help me get more dimensions

This post has been edited by Aji: Mar 13 2005, 01:57 PM

[DJKay]

Hi There,

Just to throw another name in the click fraud fray, check out Who's Clicking Who.

Good luck on your project.

DJKay

[lisphacker]

Aji, this could be a good resource:

datashaping.com

[Aji]

Thanks I have checked Who's Clicking Who. and they have cool stuffs but no free trials. I will go through datashaping.com also

Thanks again
Aji

[gmac17]

length of time on site

frequency between clicks

you can usually tell if someone clicks 3 times in 2 minutes, and they do it every day they are up to no good.

[Aji]

some smarter people clicks only 2 to 3 times a week across all your ads