Another Internet Axis of Evil Member

From Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, comes the latest member of this club of shame.

This one's a cousin of click fraud, called survey fraud.

Moving survey taking online has vastly improved the economics of doing surveys and is also beginning to increase the ability to target the perfect sample groups.

But it's also led to a lot of fraudulent behavior. Return Path's survey business, called Authentic Response, is built on some unique technology and recruiting techniques that let them avoid the fraudulent behavior which leads to better results and lower survey costs.

If you are doing a lot of online surveys, you should check out Authentic Response.

Comments

[Shivering Timbers]

This is a very real problem for people in the survey business.

It isn't just bots, either, as Matt's article discusses. Part of the problem is that getting $1 for spending 15 minutes doing a survey sounds like a bad way to earn a living, but in some parts of the world that's good money.

My company (www.vocalabs.com) does surveys testing phone-based customer service, so nearly all our surveys require the participant to actually phone someone to experience said service. That effectively makes it impossible for a bot to take one of our surveys.

Nevertheless, we have to deal with survey fraud. We found one guy in Taiwan who had signed up over 200 times, and was using a VoIP service to complete the calls. Not even using a phone number inaccessible from outside North America is enough to stop some people.

There may not be any solution to this problem short of using some sort of verified payment system. PayPal is very convenient, but it affords the recipient too much anonymity. There is no viable alternative, however.

[Chris Byrne]

Excellent point but this type of fraud is more likely to happen in the "paid survey" market. As Matt highlights this is easily managed with an enterprise level survey solution. Customers managing their own research and feedback programs with surveys are best advised to start with their own opted-in subscriber base first and build from there.

Chris Byrne
www.sensorpro.net

[Charlie Crystle]

Yahoo just gave us a $600 credit for click fraud they detected. We're looking into the source of it.