Click Fraud Advertising as Against PPC Advertising
Pay per Click Advertising or PPC ads are slowly and steadily becoming a lucrative tool to promote websites. One of the main reasons is because these ads can generate traffic to your site and at the same time you will only pay for the ad if someone clicks it. Most new websites resort to PPC ads so that they will have instant exposure.
But as with any new technology, there is a downside to PPC ads and that is Click Fraud Advertising, which is very prevalent in the internet today.
What is Click Fraud Advertising?
Click fraud happens when a person, script or program imitates the way a legitimate user will click an ad with the thought of generating pay per click without having the real and genuine interest in clicking the ad. This is a form of internet fraud that is very rampant today. In fact, this is punishable by law in California and United Kingdom.
How is PPC Advertising related to Click Fraud?
PPC advertising is a tool used by a lot of people. PPC service providers include search engines like Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. The PPC ads work in such as way that webmasters display links which were provided by the advertisers. If someone clicks the ad, there is a charge per click which would be for the account of the advertiser. Now, we have big advertising networks acting as middlemen between the website owners and advertisers. The process now entails that the advertiser pays the advertising network who pays the website owners. This more complex revenue sharing is one of the main reasons why click fraud was born.
Who are the common initiators of Click Fraud Advertising?
Besides the advertisers and advertising networks, there are parties who are not involved in the agreement who can also be perpetrators of Click Fraud. This is even harder to detect and run after because they do not have controlling interest and these parties cannot be sued because they are not part of the agreement in the first place.
Some of the common initiators are competitors who want to harm either the advertisers or website owners. They would not profit directly from this but harming their competitor through click fraud would certainly hurt the business of their competitor. Other people with malicious intent can also do click fraud. A personal motive can be in subject for this.
What are the common modus operandi of the perpetrators of Click Fraud Advertising?
Click Fraud Advertising can either be small scale or a big scale operation. It can be as simple as a person clicking on his own ads in order to generate revenue. But the main concern comes with the big scale operators of click fraud. Some companies can are even producing computer scripts or programs which would copy the way a human would click on ads. But these people are getting wiser, they know that if they concentrate their operations on a single computer or to a certain geographical area they will have increased chances of getting caught by the authorities. This enabled them to camouflage what they’re doing by masking their IP addresses. For bigger companies doing click fraud, the solution would be to setup hubs in different locations all over the country for it to look and seem legitimate.
What are the solutions that can be used to counter Click Fraud Advertising?
Click fraud is hard to detect because authorities do not have access to everyone’s computer. As a measure to stop click fraud, search engines are now investing in policies to hinder fraud. The down side to this is it is very difficult to measure if this preventive measure is successful or not.
Big companies who are using PPC ads are very vulnerable to falling prey to this type of fraud which would lead them to lose a lot of money. These companies have numerous and large-scale PPC campaigns that it is very hard to check each one if it is legitimate or not.
Companies are trying to analyze the log files of the web server of the advertisers in order to counter click fraud. But this is still not a good solution because it depends heavily on the fact that no person in the middle will be identified with fraud also.
