Warnings, Suspensions Update - 10/21

As WidgetBucks has launched, we’ve seen tremendous growth on our network and one of our big concerns as a PPC widget is click-fraud. Naturally, we have systems in place to detect click-fraud to ensure that it does not impact our advertisers and, in turn, the entire network of our thousands of publishers.

When our systems flag accounts with 10%, 20%, or even 90% (one customer even had 99%) of their clicks to be potentially fraudulent, we feel it's important to move swiftly because we take it seriously.

Going forward, as potential-click fraud is flagged within an account, we will issue an email with a three-day warning. This will allow time to dialogue with a publisher over the suspicious activity. For accounts with activity that is so egregiously fraudulent, we will suspend those publishers immediately and without warning.

Update -- as of Sunday, October 21 (9 am PDT)

As an addition to the original post above, over the past 2 days, WidgetBucks has suspended an undisclosed number of accounts that do not meet the network's Terms of Use, primarily related to click-fraud, but also for publishers not requesting permission to put widgets on primarily non-English language sites. Ad-only sites and sites with any pornography content are also not allowed, and have also resulted in suspensions. If an account is suspended for violating any of these terms, all earnings (commissions, bonuses, fees) are forfeited. A number of 3-day warnings were issued during the last 2 days as well.

When it comes to detecting fraud, we are currently using a number of key measurements to evaluate sites. We can detect sites where click fraud is occurring by evaluating conversion to sale and traffic trends, as well as CTR and audit/filter percentage. And in instances where a site has good CTR and conversion to sale ratios, that publisher would not be suspended in the event of occasional spikes in abnormal click traffic.

We're taking this course of action to protect our ecosystem of advertisers and thousands of publishers.

WidgetBucks publishers inquiring about login and account access should submit an email to help [at] widgetbucks [dot] com so specific concerns can be addressed on an individual account basis, rather than through this blog's comment board. Thank you.

-Dean