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How Click Fraud Can Hurt 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 added PPC companies substantial and small are at the moment sucking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable assessment of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the Pay Per Click marketing arena has not unsurprisingly attracted armies of scam artists whose tricks have the capability to honestly erode consumer confidence.
Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a actual customer of a internet browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having genuine interest in the target product of the ad’s link. Despite the fact that it is hard to police and keep under control, some search engines have created automated systems that try to shield against these practices with varying degrees of effectiveness, but still the most highly developed of them are not infallible.
Further confusing the circumstances is the fact that the advertisers themselves gain financially from such fraud. The biggest networks fulfill two positions, as Pay Per Click providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can create conflicts of interest. For case in point, whereas a Pay Per Click 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 Pay Per Click 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 instances of non-contracting parties are:
Marketing competitors – By knowingly clicking on their competitors ads (by this means they are forcing them to shell out for worthless clicks) they can disrupt their business activities or worse yet put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from the 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 attempt to stop fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are real and which are not. Usually the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.
Before you start any internet business, make sure you read Ron Cripps excellent articles on Web Promotion and creating a profitable internet business. Free reports and software downloads available.
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