Here's how to prepare yourself to be able to detect click fraud and potentially get a refund from Google or Overture:

1. Track your conversion rate. Don't just use the Google and Overture tools. Find a unified way to track both conversions from all ad networks, outside of the Google or Overture system.
2. Log everything. Capture referrers, user-agents, cookies, etc.
3. Save everything. Save all your old logs and monthly reports from the ad networks
4. Log a user or session cookie to each web server log line.
5. Log numeric IP address. Don't use DNS lookup to insert the name into your log file.
6. Add tags to your destination URLs - especially on Google! You need to include the keyword and other relevant details. This topic alone deserves a whole post.
7. Graph conversion rate against clicks from Google / Overture.

That's a start - you certainly need to keep good records and all your clickstream data.

¶ 2/26/2005