For those not familiar with click fraud, Wikipedia explains it as “…a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.”
With the economy in the state that it is in, pressure is being put on businesses of all sizes. Can we point the finger at search engines and blame them for the higher minimum bids and more clicks that do not lead to sales conversions? I think that would be unfair, but who really knows what happens with a PPC campaign other than its host. What it boils down to is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish a malicious click from an organic one.
What really hurts the PPC world is the botnets trend. A botnet is a collection of robots that are trained to run automatically and autonomously. A bonet is also the same tool that search engines use to index web pages and determine your ranking. These “bots” can be trained to generate fraudulent clicks, which can ultimately destroy a PPC campaign.
Below are some interesting statistics regarding click fraud, courtesy of Zdnet:
· The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.3 percent for Q1 2008.
· The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.8 percent.
· Q1 2008 click fraud traffic from botnets was 8 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q4 2007.
· In Q1 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Monaco (3.1 percent), Ghana (3.1 percent), and New Caledonia (2.4 percent).
Click fraud is a felony in most jurisdictions and could bring down a company in a matter of weeks. Solutions on how to prevent click fraud are being widely debated, however, they all revolve around these two main areas: 1.) Forensic analysis of advertisers’ web server log files. 2.) Third-party corroboration.