Combating Click Fraud

Google Adwords and pay-per-click have become common language of late with most online marketers. The vast majority use some form of pay-per-click as a major tool for their advertising campaigns. There is however one important area that very few marketers pay much, if any attention to.

Click fraud.

Pay-per-click marketing figures could be over inflated and distorted as they must be by click fraud. This is the means by which a person, computer programme or script imitates a legitimate user by clicking on an ad without having actual interest in the link. Each time a person clicks on the link the charge comes into force and a false interest is registered.

It is said by Google that invalid clicks consistently make up fewer than 10 per cent of all clicks on the Google advertising system. Google takes this issue very seriously and has devoted significant resources and expertise to developing proactive, technically sophisticated measures to filter invalid clicks before advertisers are charged for them.

Google investigate every click fraud claim made by their advertisers in the interests of good customer service. Customers will then be credited retroactively as appropriate. As a result of these continued efforts, the percentage of invalid clicks that may escape detection is very small.

Really why would anyone want to commit click fraud as nothing is really gained from it for the perpetrator? It is probably just mischief and that is why the proportion is quite small. However, this is Googles explanation:-

What are click fraud and invalid clicks?

You may have heard the terms 'click fraud' and 'invalid clicks' and wondered how or if they're different. Here's a definition of each:
Click fraud refers to clicks generated with malicious or fraudulent intent.

Invalid clicks are clicks on AdWords ads that Google suspects may constitute click fraud. Advertisers are not charged for these clicks.
Where does click fraud originate?

There are two primary incentives for committing click fraud:

AdWords advertisers may try to attack competitors by raising their costs or exhausting their budget early in the day.
AdSense publishers may click ads appearing on their own websites in order to inflate revenue.

Here are the primary methods for carrying out click fraud attacks:

Manual clicking
Click farms (hiring individuals to manually click ads)
Pay-to-click sites (pyramid schemes created by publishers)
Click bots (software to automate clicking)
Botnets (hijacked computers utilized by click bots)

How does Google protect advertisers against click fraud?

At a basic level, we protect advertisers against click fraud by not charging for suspicious clicks. The intent of a click is difficult to determine with a high degree of scientific accuracy. We therefore create a high false positive rate by marking a much larger number of clicks as invalid compared to the number of clicks we believe to be generated with bad intent.

Undoubtedly, there will be some instances of click fraud which will go undetected by our proactive systems and processes. By casting the net of invalid clicks wide enough, however, we are able to effectively minimize that proportion.

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