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To some extent, the technology to combat click fraud is similar to what banks are using to combat credit card fraud. The best systems are based on statistical scoring technology, as the transaction - a click in our context - is usually not either bad or good.

Multiple scoring systems based e.g. on IP and click scores, scorecards and metric mix optimization are the basic ingredients. Because of the vast amount of data, and potentially millions of metrics used in a good scoring system, combinatorial optimization is required, using algorithms such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo or simulated annealing.

While scoring advertiser data can be viewed as a regression problem, the dependent variable being the conversion metric, scoring search engine data is more challenging as conversion data is not readily available. Even when dealing with advertiser data, we have several issues to address. First, the scores need to be standardized. Two identical ad campaigns might perform very differently if the landing pages are different. The scoring system needs to address this issue.

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