Click fraud is the act of clicking on an ad with the intention of
falsely inflating a publisher’s revenue or artificially depleting the
budget of a competitor.
Like most crimes, it comes in degrees. On the smallest scale, a
competitor of a pay-per-click advertiser may maliciously click on a
competitor’s ad to drive up the competitor’s costs. This type of
click fraud is fairly easily detected and actively prevented by most
networks.
On a larger scale, fraudsters may employ real people to click on a
pay-per-click ad. These programs, often called “paid to read/surf,”
promise members money and other rewards for clicking on ads. The
users are committing click fraud even though they probably have no
idea what click fraud is or the effect it has on online marketing.
Again on a larger scale, clickbots are available to for download.
Clickbots create fraudulent clicks by following normal traffic
patterns, making them difficult to detect.
As PPC advertising was established, search engines began to run
advertisements not only on their own properties, but also on partner
Web sites through syndication programs. These programs, such as
Google’s AdSense and Yahoo Search Marketing, allow publishers to post
the engines’ PPC ads on their sites. When visitors click on the ads,
the publishers receive a commission, a portion of the fee the
advertiser pays to the engine.
The more clicks that a publisher generates, the more commissions it
earns. Therein lies the motivation for creating fraudulent clicks.
Determining the scope of click fraud is difficult. ClickForensics, a
third-party provider of click-traffic auditing for advertisers,
estimated click fraud at 13.7 percent of all clicks. If these numbers
are accurate, that would come to $1.09 billion that the search
engines received from click fraud revenue alone.
If that weren’t enough, this figure is likely far lower than reality
because these tools can only “see” post-click data and activities,
missing half of the action. Click auditing firms have access only to
their own users’ data and rely on often faulty advertiser input.
For these and other reasons, it is difficult for a true figure to be
revealed without one source monitoring a majority of traffic.
Counting click fraud isn’t the solution, though. The solution is in
detecting and preventing click fraud, which can be accomplished only
by PPC networks. They are the only ones that can see the
advertisement as it is being displayed and clicked on, and the only
ones that can prevent publishers from earning commissions on
fraudulent clicks.
A look at the click fraud problem
