Click Fraud And What It Can Mean To Your Online Business
Pay Per Click or what is known as PPC is a method of online advertising that is utilized on web sites (like blogs for example) as well as search engines and advertising networks. Merchants put up ad content with a variety of such web hosts and the host is remunerated only if and when their ad is clicked. The words “pay per click” factually means what it says: the Merchant pays every time a visitor clicks on the ad.
Google, Yahoo! and all the additional PPC companies large and minor are now picking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad income based partly on the theory that clicks are a trustworthy, quantifiable gauge of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the PPC arena has not unsurprisingly appealed to armies of con artists whose actions have the ability to really erode consumer confidence.
Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer software application imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target product of the ad’s link. Though hard to police and keep under control, some search engines have built automated systems which try to defend against these practices with different degrees of effectiveness, but still the most sophisticated of them are not without problems.
Further complicating the situation is the fact that the advertisers themselves benefit financially from such fraud. The biggest networks play 2 roles, as PPC providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can create conflicts of interest. For instance, whilst a PPC network will lose money to click fraud when it makes payment to a publisher, it more than makes up for it when it collects money from an advertiser, so indirectly, the PPC Network profits from click fraud.
Click fraud can be something as straightforward as starting a trivial Web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to generate revenue. Frequently the amount of clicks and their value is so tiny that the fraud goes undetected. Larger-sized frauds involve running scripts which simulate a human clicking on advertisements in web pages on a extensive scale.
Another cause of click fraud is what are known as non-contracting parties, these parties are not part of any pay-per-click agreement.
Some examples of non-contracting parties are:
Advertising competitors – By deliberately clicking on their competitors ads (in so doing forcing them to shell out for worthless clicks) they can weaken them or worse yet put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from this type of click fraud.
Publishing Competitors – Publishers may attempt to set up their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own PPC advertisements, with their end result hoping to be that the advertising network cancels their account.
Malice – Like the types of people who knowingly exploit and then email computer viruses, some will engage in click fraud not for financial benefit but simply to make a publisher or advertiser look bad for whatever reason.
Friendship – Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers find out that their friend’s business makes money when their ads are clicked on, they may possibly elect to do this themselves, thinking that they are helping out. If they overdo it however, they can do more harm than good when the publisher is accused of being involved with click fraud and has their account closed.
While advertising networks make every effort to end fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are legitimate. More often than not the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.
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