Additional Information:

Is this a case of you-get-what-you-pay-for?  Probably, but it’s worth trying out before laying down $10-$100 a month or more for a service that may be more than you need.

Click Sentinel is an IP-based tracking system that works like much of its competitors, using Click Sentinel’s code as the referring link for all visits to your site. Click Sentinel will then examine such considerations as conversions (and lacks thereof), pages viewed, duration on the site, and geographic origin.

The reports Click Sentinel generates for you also include some nifty features not typically found with other services, like the current estimated level of click fraud occurring within each of the PPC search engines.

If suspicious or fraudulent activity is detected, Click Sentinel will notify both you (by email) and the perpetrator (by gentle, non-accusatory popup message) that such behavior is suspected.

Click Sentinel provides a Fraud Calculator into which you can input certain basic stats and determine the percentage of likely fraudulent activity for any campaign.

Click Sentinel does offer valuable add-ons to the basic software for – of course – a “small fee”. One such feature is the multi-user option, allowing you to track multiple PPC campaigns. Pricing has not yet been solidified, but they estimate the cost at being less than $100, and they say that this will be one-time fee.

A small monthly fee, however, will be charged for access to a daily list of known fraudulent IPs. Again, the Click Sentinel team has not yet released their pricing structure for this feature.

Click Sentinel 2 will be open software, meaning that you can easily add metrics and stats of your own for the program to collect on your behalf. Click Sentinel 2 will even facilitate your incorporating these user-defined variables into the overall “fraud score” CS2 calculates for each click.

Stay tuned here and one the Click Sentinel site for further details about this in-progress product, expected to launch in a BETA version as early as sometime this month. If you visit the site, you can sign up on their email list to be notified when the official launch occurs and you will receive, as a bonus, 48 hours of multi-user access privileges. It does not appear that Click Sentinel 1 is available to new users any longer.