Kanoodle and Click Fraud
Click fraud is a virus which has spread for years in the online advertising industry. As advertising payment systems grew from per click to CPM or commissions, click fraud seemed to be on the low for a couple of years. Enter paid search network distribution and contextual advertising and the net world was introduced to a new form of click fraud from numerous sources.
Yahoo and Google both claim they are stopping click fraud in its path with technical security measures and prosecution. But when a search marketing company takes its campaigns beyond Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask to companies like Lycos, Findwhat, Looksmart, Searchfeed and MyGeek; it is only natural for such marketers to worry about fraudulent clicks. Hence the formation of Click Fraud monitoring services like Who’s Clicking Who and Keyword Max.
Enter Kanoodle. I spoke with John Cunningham of Hamptons Bride Magazine earlier this year about a piece he printed on Kanoodle and click fraud. I would have probably not even paid much attention to the piece had I not extended a proven search marketing campaign to Kanoodle for one week, and experienced not-so-pleasent results. Below is a shocking first-hand tale of one companies experience with Kanoodle and click fraud.
Are we saying that Kanoodle is suspect of committing click fraud? I’m not the technical authority to answer such a question and will let the readers of this piece decide for yourselves. The following is John Cunningham’s story of his experience with Kanoodle and computer generated clicks.
Over the last few months we have been using multiple avenues of internet marketing including Overture and Adwords. Our positive results with the two companies made me search for other PPC programs. I stumbled across an ad on GoDaddy.com for Kanoodle.com and seen the cpc was less than the two major search engines and decided to give it a try.
I was extremely impressed my first day up seeing the amount of traffic I was getting by logging into my account and with the lower cost was getting more traffic than from Google and Yahoo’s programs. We are very meticulous when it comes to tracking our readers and use this information daily to make sure we are not only giving our readers what they want but also giving our Advertisers the results that they need.
After reviewing our stats we noticed a HUGE problem with the clicks coming from the Kanoodle network. 100% of all traffic coming from them stayed for a whole ZERO seconds. Our readers stay over the last few months has averaged around 2.5 minutes and up to 4 to 6 hours. At first I thought maybe it was because we were new to the network and gave them the benefit of the doubt, but as days passed the results were the same; not a single click from Kanoodle ever had a visit length over Zero seconds. How is this possible?
You would think that they would get lucky at least once and have one click through stay at least 2 seconds to read our splash page before they exited. It is our conclusion that Kanoodle is completely computer generated clicks, not human generated. I am writing this hoping others will read and not be Kanoodled as I was. As an online business I understand the importance of generating traffic to our website and find it very discouraging that such blatant deceit would come from what I thought was a legitimate company. I will be posting our stat results for you to view and you can come to your own conclusions.
Here are the results generated from Statcounter.com. I have highlighted the clicks coming from Kanoodle and underlined the ones from google and yahoo. You will also see 90% of the traffic generated from kanoodle happens from 12am to 2am. We do not get any traffic from them during the day. Be sure to read the last two pages so you can see what our normal traffic looks like…
Read John’s further experience with Kanoodle in “Kanoodle Follow Up“
