Click fraud is a problem that can seriously undermine your pay-per-click advertising efforts. Pay per click is a paid inclusion model used by some search engine companies that usually requires you to bid on words (keywords) or phrases (keyphrases) that your target market might use when performing searches.
The highest bidder gets the top ranking in the search results, with the next-highest bid below and so on. Each time a listing is checked on, the bid amount is subtracted from the advertiser’s deposit.
Online advertising fraud has been around from the early days of the Internet. To justify the expensive rates and create additional inventory, shady publishers devised the means of artificial inflation of impressions and click-throughs to advertisers’ Web sites. Today, click fraud refers to the premeditated practice of clicking on pay-per-click ads without the intent to buy advertisers’ products or services or take other actions.
Http://www.dmnews.com/pdffiles/clickfraud.pdf
