Getting an ROI through your PPC campaigns

In a post today at Inside AdWords Google blasted 3 major click fraud detecting companies, AdWatcher, ClickFacts, and Click Forensics.

In the post Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, said "Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants – flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated." Emphasis mine.

Basically Shuman is telling the world that these consultants don't know what they're doing.  Personally I'm inclined to agree.  Do these consultants think they have better reporting that Google?  Of course not, but they do argue a good point, is Google being honest with advertisers?

Shuman lists two reasons why consultants often come up with incorrect numbers when determining the amount of fradulent clicks.

1. Reloads
If you navigate to page A via AdWords, the click a link to page B, then page C, then page D, but you hit your back button to get all the way back to page A, some browsers will refresh that page.  In theory that page had two hits from one user, but really it was only one genuine page view.  Google would not count this as fradulent because the user only clicked one ad.  The advertiser on the other hand will see two page views from the same user and assume that user clicked the ad twice.  That would lead the consultant and advertiser to believe that there was one fradulent click.

2. Incorrect use of cookies
Cookies are used by advertisers to track visitors as they navigate from AdWords to your site and beyond.  One consultant places a cookie that is so generic that it counts clicks from Yahoo and Google in the same way.  That error would mean that you couldn't tell where a fradulent click actually came from.

Shuman also said, "These kinds of flaws in methodology cause click counts in consultant reports to be artificially inflated. One clear indication that the consultants’ results are flawed: they’re not even getting the total number of clicks correct. We have seen some instances of reports showing 1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs – for example, in one case 1,278 clicks were claimed as being “fraudulent” by the consultant while only 850 actually even appeared as clicks in Google’s logs."

I'm not sure who to believe in this situation.  Neither party can be trusted, both have a stake in the outcome.  Google makes money from fradulent clicks, but consultants only get paid if fradulent clicks genuinely exist and AdWords doesn't catch them.

Either way, something fishy is definitely going on, but with who?