In this article we're going to cover a form of fraud that not too many people are aware of because it doesn't get a lot of attention. But it is becoming a major problem on the Internet. It's called Click Fraud. Ever since the beginning of pay per click advertising, click fraud was always a possibility. But nobody ever thought it would become the problem that it is. To understand what click fraud is you first have to understand what pay per click advertising is. Pay per click advertising is the practice of posting ads on the Internet, usually on a search engine like Google, where you only pay for the ad if a customer clicks on it. So if you get 10 customers that see your ad for a day and only 1 of those customers click on the ad you only pay for that one click, and not for the 10 people who happened to read or see your ad. This is why a site like Google will tell you how many times your ad was seen on the page and how many clicks it got. This way you can get a good idea of how effective your ad is. The problem is that not all the clicks you get to your ad are legit. One common practice, especially among rival companies, is to click on the rival company's ad a number of times to drive up the ad costs for the company, This is blatant fraud and is discovered by checking the IP addresses of the people clicking on the ads. What happens is that the company finds a large number of clicks from one IP address and then when they check the IP address they find that it is a company that sells a competing product or service. But this most obvious form of click fraud is not the only kind. A more difficult to spot kind is when ads are fed to web sites like personal blogs by the major search engines, especially Google. The search engine matches the ads to the relevant content of the site so that when people go to the site they are more likely to see ads that they would be interested in. The fraud comes in when the people who host these sites figure out a way to get these ads clicked on so that they make money from them. These are fraudulent clicks as they are generated by the web site owner and not by a person who goes to the site as a real visitor. This goes on all the time and is out of control. Google does what it can to prevent this but most of their efforts are in vain. The amount of click fraud is hard to calculate. Search engines know it goes on but because of the vastness of the Internet there is no way to get an accurate handle on it. The only thing that is certain is that if click fraud isn't handled it will destroy one of the most lucrative way to make money on the Internet, pay per click advertising. |
