As many of you know, I’ve been working on programming the TTZMedia’s Affiliate Banner System for the last several months for John Chow, and there’s always ongoing maintenance to do. Speed and load optimization, design fixes, and stats modules upgrades, referral program add-ons, etc.

One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.

So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.

Here are some of the more obvious signs that I can disclose :

• One ip address has dozens, or in one case, 119 clicks over a 2 month period.
• You see a CTR of over 20%, while the views are logging quite a bit. If you had 5 view and 1 person clicked it, that’s 20% CTR. But If you have hundreds of views, or thousands, with a double digit CTR, there’s something wrong.
• We see multiple clicks from the same ip address that logged into the affiliate admin section.

There are more that I won’t disclose as that’s my algorithm secrets. BUT.

All of the above can be scanned and noted with very simple database management queries, and are easy to detect. Right now I’ve ran some scripts that I wrote this evening to zap these extra clicks, and there have been thousands of clicks removed already over the last hour or so, with more to come.

We’re not stupid. Those signs are easy to find. It’s very easy for us to determine whether an affiliate is messing with us or not. Proxy servers, automatic page refreshers are all gimmicks. We know. So does our affiliate provider, shopping.com. If the logs don’t match, you’ll be booted. Simple as that.

I’ll note roughly how many clicks are removed by the end of the evening.