Who Commits Click Fraud and Why?

The culprits could be competitors that want you to overspend on advertising or skew search results. Every dollar you spend on useless advertising is a dollar off your bottom line. And if you have set a daily spend limit for your PPC ads, every fraudulent click dilutes that limit. Also, as your daily budget is used up, your ads can sink lower in the rankings.

Another source of click fraud is unscrupulous affiliates who make money from click-throughs. These affiliates sign up for a program where they are compensated per click-through to your site. If they send you legitimate customers it can be a win-win deal. But the dishonest ones can generate a large number fake clicks.

How Do They Do It?

Click fraud can be automated or manual. It can be as simple as a rival occasionally clicking on competitor ads just to push his advertising costs up. But click fraud schemes can be sophisticated as well. A common method is to use online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links. A growing alternative uses low-cost workers in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads. These fraudulent clicks are harder to trace because they can be spread across a large network.

How Can You Protect Yourself Against Click Fraud?

Web analytics companies are beginning to address the problem with their software. Urchin, for example, includes a Click Fraud Module that identifies repeat clickers by IP address and then does a WHOIS lookup.

But if your Web statistics package is unable to identify fraud, there are other services that can help you. ClickLab and Whosclickingwho, for example, make identifying and deterring click fraud their focus. They are available by monthly subscription. Both apply a statistical scoring algorithm to identify potential fraud. Reports can then be used to request refunds from the search engines and/or reevaluate search terms. A tactic used by both to deter fraud is to display a message to anyone that clicks through repeatedly. Whosclickingwho's is called the "ClickMinder," and reads like this:

"Your internet location has been detected visiting this site more than 5 times via links from one or more pay-per-click search engines. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you and thank you for your visits. To protect our customers from higher prices by keeping advertising dollars down, we routinely examine recurrent visitations from PPC Search Engines. Please help us pass the savings on to you by bookmarking our site for future reference. Thank you for visiting and please enjoy browsing our site!"

This is polite enough not to alienate legitimate clickers, but likely to deter at least amateur fraudsters.

For more information, read ClickLab's free white paper,"How To Protect Your Website Against Click Fraud.

More Click Fraud Resources

Clicklab
WhosClickingWho

http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/seo/a/clickfraud.htm