What Is To Be Done about this New Click Fraud Menace? Tracking this form of click fraud may be more difficult than with other forms, since your server logs won't be any help when criminal has never visited your site. Still, as with other forms of click fraud, one of your best defenses is to monitor your click-through rate, and look for sudden changes. Only now you'll have to watch out for sudden drops as well as sudden spikes.

If you've been a victim of this kind of click fraud, or think you may have been, we'd love to hear your horror story, along with how Google responded (or didn't respond). Of course, if you don't want us to share it with our readers, you can trust us to keep a secret.

Future implications for search engine advertising Of course, Microsoft Corporation has such a sterling reputation in internet community and world at large that it will undoubtedly be trusted implicitly with such a wealth of information on every user. And most people have absolutely no reason to care if their online activity were associated with their real identities, anyway.

True, it is widely believed that almost a quarter of all web page views and a comparable proportion of search engine searches involve naughtynaughty pictures. But surely that's work of a small army of trench-coat-wearing filth addicts who spend all day doing nothing but feed their habit, and on multiple computers simultaneously. Certainly not you, any of your family members, or that guy in shipping department who wears a WWJD T-shirt to work everyday and is always trying to convince anyone in earshot that dinosaurs and radioactive dating of their fossils are yet another figment of degenerate left-wing imagination.

So naturally, Microsoft has nothing to worry about. Privacy advocates, bloggers, message boards and chat rooms around internet won't be on fire with warnings not to use MSN search unless you want a permanent record of your doings attached to that Hotmail account you deleted but that may not have really been deleted. And no prosecutor will make headlines by trying to introduce a defendant's MSN online activity history as evidence into court.

And so it naturally follows that we can all forget about Overture and Google Adwords since there's a new kid on block who's so much cooler.

Previous page: Background of new MSN PPC Advertising Network

If you're interested in reading further, one of most extensive discussions of MSN's new advertising program is marketing blog of Charlene Li at Forrester corporation. That blog is representative of rose-colored-glasses view held by big corporate marketing world. Microsoft's press release announcing new MSN advertising program is also worth reading if you're that into this.