Ripple Effects Case Study

Ripple Effects Receives Click Fraud Refund, Remains Focused on Good Marketing Practices

Interactive marketing agency Ripple Effects Interactive was able to obtain a refund approximately four weeks after reporting click fraud through ClickTracks' Click Fraud report.

Search Marketing Manager Michael Lieberman and team allocated $1,500 per month for a targeted campaign to run on Yahoo! Search Marketing. The group intended to increase spend to $4,000 per month, but held back due to suspicious behavior related to the campaign.

So in early April 2006, Ripple Effects Interactive participated in ClickTracks' early access program for Click Fraud detection. The report immediately flagged the campaign, citing a higher than average number of visitors from Turkey and a higher than average number of visitors with no referrer. "This was a geo-targeted campaign for a well-known business school. We were targeting prospective MBA students searching for business programs within our client's geographic area, and international traffic to our client's site is not unusual," explained Lieberman, "but as soon as we learned of the unusually high number of visits from one foreign country, we wanted to act immediately to ensure our client's campaign was performing as intended."

"Before using the Click Fraud report, ClickTracks web analytics showed us that this particular campaign was receiving average-time-on-site of 25 seconds and very few pages per visitor," said Lieberman. "We tweaked the campaign a bit and chose to let it run a few more days to see if performance improved."

ClickTracks' Click Fraud Forensics report was even more revealing. Typically, when a visitor clicks on an ad in search results or affiliate content, the referring site is clearly listed. Some small percentage of real visitors block the referring site, but an absent referrer is often associated with a robot or click farm software. In this case, 100% of the clicks from Turkey had no referrer at all.

At this point, Lieberman was convinced that the clicks from Turkey were click fraud. Armed with the ClickTracks fraud forensics report, Lieberman contacted Yahoo! Search Marketing and received a prompt reply and promise to review the report. Four weeks after reporting, Ripple Effects Interactive received confirmation of a full refund from Yahoo for the offending clicks. Yahoo did not acknowledge any click fraud, but instead granted a refund that matched the amount paid for the clicks from Turkey. Yahoo called the refund a "goodwill credit" unrelated to "unqualified clicks."

While recovering 40% of the campaign cost is commendable, Lieberman is quick to point out that adjusting campaigns for success is far more important than seeking out click fraud perpetrators.

"It's about marketing. That's what it comes down to—no excuses," said Lieberman, "Sharing data pools and click value consortiums just aren't the way to go—we don't want everyone looking at our data to try to catch an elusive perpetrator. Marketers have to accept responsibility for their own campaigns. ClickTracks helps us stay focused on what we do best, strategic interactive marketing. That means having the flexibility to adjust campaigns to improve performance—whether it's click fraud or not."

Ripple Effects Interactive is a premier digital marketing agency ranked among the nation's Top 25 independent interactive firms by Advertising Age. With offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Ripple Effects offers a full range of services from strategic communications planning and website design to online & search marketing and web application development. For more information, visit www.RippleEffectsInteractive.com.