Over the weekend I received an email and a phone call from my credit card company. They’d noticed suspicious activity on my card, and wanted me to resolve it. Since this was about the 3rd time in the last month I called them, expecting it to be the usual over-protectiveness. But no, my card had been used for several hundred dollars worth of purchases in the Florida area.

Naturally I won’t have to pay for any of this, but it’s good to know that the credit card company constantly analyzes their data looking for aberrations. Are you doing the same with your site?

• The most obvious way is to look at your analytics, see what’s going on, where your users are going, what they’re doing when they get there, and look for those aberrations. An example of this was when one of our clients suddenly discovered a great deal of traffic suddenly going to a ‘free sample’ page. A posting about their product had been made on a ‘free products’ site. Knowing this enabled them to know how to handle that traffic, and identify what changes they needed to make to that page to more qualify the traffic.
• Look at your source code. While certain hackers take delight in redirecting a site, or overwriting the code, there are those more insidious hackers, that merely insert links into your site, taking advantage of security holes in popular publishing platforms (i.e. an unpatched WordPress installation). This can easily be done (depending on the size of your site) by using an external link checking tool that will also validate any links found.
• Look at who is buying PPC ads for your company / product name. Are they attempting to confuse users by pretending to be the genuine company? Are there trademark violations?
• Look at where your PPC traffic is coming from, if your conversion rates drop, look for similarities in the clicks, are they all from the same foreign country / city? If 50% is coming from the same IP address, there’s a very good chance it’s fraudulent.

With all of these, the onus is on you to identify that you have a problem when you have it, because if you don’t… who will?

Filed under: In-House on Friday, September 5th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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