What is click fraud?
In brief, click fraud is the activity of clicking on paid Internet ads with the express intention of denying the advertiser their desired action be it a sale on an  e-commerce web site or the generation of a sales lead.

Who Commits Click Fraud?
There are two main groups of people committing click fraud, your keyword competitors and syndicated ad publishers.

Keyword competitors are organisations who are competing on the same keywords as you.  They know how much your keywords cost, and they want you off the seach engines so they can promote their own ads with as little competition as possible. They repeatedly click on your ads in an attempt to deplete your advertising budget so eventually your ads drops off the search result.

The second group of click fraudsters are website owners who publish syndicated ads on their sites. Using programmes such as Google Adsense website owners publish ads, and if they are clicked on, they share the ad income with the pay per click supplier. This site publishes in context ads about Real estate, this is an example of syndicated ads. The fraudulent clicker will access their own ads in an attempt to increase their revenues.

Why Commit Click Fraud?
It’s the oldest answer in the book money.  Competitors commit click fraud to  make money through their product or service sales, publishers make money from syndicated ad click through.

How is it committed?
Click fraud is committed in one of three ways, the first is the manual clicking on ads displayed by the search engines. The second is the use of click farms. Groups of people in developing nations paid small amounts of click on ads and act as if they are real browser in an attempt to bypass search engine safeguards. The last and probably most effective method is via click bots, automated software which imitates a user browsing a site. Click bots work like a computer virus, machines are infected and send out clicks to sites under the control of a nefarious bot hearder. Click bot attacks are very difficult to detect.

What are the Search Engines Doing?
The search engines have implemented filters to capture click fraud, but the big problem is that they do not disclose information on click fraud committed against your campaigns.  We do not know how effective the filters are as there is no phone bill type call itemisation of clicks showing which is invalid and which is genuine.

Until the search engines open up their database for scrutiny and create an atmosphere of trust, the only way to ensure your campaigns are in good order is to use one of the click fraud monitoring solutions on the market.

Further Information
This post is a summary of click fraud, for more details on the subject , why not check out Fraudulent Clicks.

Neil supplies a click fraud investigation service and has given an investigation as a competition prize to readers of http://search-matters.com.  To win a $500 click fraud investigation. simply make a comment about why we should pick you as the prize winner. The best answer wins!

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