Google is sued over ‘click fraud’ on ads

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — It may be hard to imagine that an ad offering “Welder b-tonis” — something with no connection to reality — would get clicks from potential customers.

But in a lawsuit claiming Google rakes in billions of dollars from fraudulent clicks, a business owner claims the hits on two nonsensical ads he created show that click fraud is rampant on Google ads.

Plaintiff Gurminder Singh of Vacaville, Calif., who is seeking class-action status for his suit, said he had been paying Google for online advertising since 2008, but early last year he began to suspect his ads were being “fraudulently manipulated” by third parties.

An unusual number of clicks led to no “conversion,” or follow-through, such as an online purchase or a call to a business, Singh claimed.

Singh said he had started advertising with Google after he learned through his research that the Mountain View digital-advertising powerhouse “promises to protect consumers from fraudulent clicks.”

Fake clicks are a problem for advertisers, who get charged by Google according to the number of times an ad is clicked.

Fraudulent clicks may originate from competitors hoping to drive up rivals’ costs, or from the owners of websites publishing pay-per-click ads, who make more money the more those ads are clicked.

The lawsuit points toward “click farms” — groups of workers paid very little to click on ads — and “click bots,” or software programs that do the clicking.

Google, Singh said in his complaint , told customers that it catches the “vast majority” of invalid clicks, and that fake clicks accounted for fewer than 10 percent of all AdWords hits.

However, he claimed, “Google has a very limited incentive to reduce third-party click fraud, because it, like the third-party website publisher, benefits from each additional click, even if such click is fraudulent.”

Google’s failure to deal with click fraud “has increased its profits by billions each and every year,” Singh claimed.

To test whether there was substance behind his suspicions, Singh designed an experiment in which he twice created both a real ad and a gibberish ad and compared the number of clicks received.

Results for his ad touting “Excellent Graphic Designs Local USA Artist Designs Custom Made Wedding Invites” were compared to those from “Welder b-tonis Welders we’ll take your left over B-tonis and produce nice designs.”

The real ad got 68 clicks, the fake ad 64, delivering a fraudulent click rate of 48 percent, Singh claimed.

Google, on a web page about invalid clicks, says it uses automated systems to filter them out, and investigates any complaints from advertisers.

Singh had filed the lawsuit in July. This month he learned that San Jose U.S. District Court Judge Beth Freeman wasn’t going to allow his experiment as evidence.