Click Fraud And What To Do About It
Click fraud is the practise of clicking on pay-per-click ads
for the purpose of generating income for the clicker or to
incur costs for competitors.
A website may have a number of ads which generate a small
income for each click on each ad. The costs for such ads may
be paid directly by the advertiser to the owner of the
website or may be paid through sponsored links provided by
Google or other search engines. The owner of a website owner
may generate income for the website simply by manually
clicking on ads multiple times every day. An automated
script or computer program may also be used to generate
clicks and such automation can generate a large amount of
traffic.
Several websites may use the same keywords to advertise in
Google’s AdWords program. The administrators of each website
may make a bid for the keywords and set a daily limit for
the amount of money spent on clicks. If a website
administrator has set a daily limit for clicks, then his or
her competitors may deplete the daily budget by clicking
repeatedly on the sponsored links. After depleting the daily
budget, only the competitor’s ads are shown and generate
traffic for real visitors.
Click fraud can therefore cost you and knowing how to detect
it can save you money.
As mentioned above, click fraud may be committed by manually
clicking on ads or by computer programs. A computer program
performing the clicking can operate from one computer or may
be distributed across many computers on the internet - for
example computers that are remote controlled by hackers.
Detecting click fraud can be relatively easy or difficult
depending on the extent to which it is performed and the way
it is done. If your competitor clicks on your ads on Google
a few times per day, you are unlikely to be able to discern
this from legitimate clicks performed by potential
customers. If however a computer program is run from a
single computer that generates a large number of clicks,
this is fairly easy to detect. By analysing the logs files
which your hosting company make available, you will be able
to detect a sudden large amount of traffic originating from
one particular IP address. If however click fraud is being
perpetrated from a network of distributed computers then
detection is more challenging. The first sign you will
notice is that traffic to your website has increased for no
apparent reason. Detection is based on the fact that
computer programs are more likely to behave in a repetitive
fashion than human beings.
Here is what you need to look for:
* Do you suddenly have a lot of traffic originating from a
certain website or search engine?
* Has the traffic to your website changed, so you suddenly
receive more traffic from certain browsers or operating
systems?
* Have the paths of your visitors suddenly changed for no
particular reason, for example so more visitors now visit
only the entry page?
* Is a smaller percentage of your visitors suddenly buying
your products or signing up to your service?
If you believe that you may be the victim of click fraud you
may contact your hosting company and ask for their help. If
you are using sponsored links with one of the search engines
you may contact the support at the search engines and they
can help you with investigation. Use of a computer to commit
this type of fraud is a crime in many jurisdictions, for
example as covered by Penal code 502 in California and the
Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. If you are
the victim of click fraud then report it to the appropriate
authorities.
Useful links:
www.statcounter.com
Statistics for your website. By placing a small piece of
code on your web pages statcounter tracks your traffic and
generates statistics for it
www.weblogexpert.com
Program for analysing the raw log files provided by your
hosting company. WeblogExpert provides a free version with
limited functionality and as well as a full version with
additional functionality.
You have permission to publish this article electronically
or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are
included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be
appreciated.
About the Author:
Andrew Nielsen is the author of
“The Online Business
Builder”
He is an internet entrepreneur and is currently
helping online business start ups getting on their feet.
Visit http://www.i-want-to-be-rich.com or mailto:
an@i-want-to-be-rich.com
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