Oct 30
CLICK FRAUD
Click fraud a type of illegal online activity employed by those engaged in Pay per Click advertising. It is defined by Google as “any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions.” With the emergence of this Pay per Click advertising model, those who engage in it have come up with different means to maximize their profits gain through advertisement links. This malicious act can be done either by employed human beings that serve this function or automated scripts.
Software for this type of illegal activity has even been developed. Whether it is a person, a script, or a program, its purpose is to increase profits by pretending to be a legitimate user. Its primary function is to click links and therefore creates more page impressions which increase the charges to the advertiser. This type of fraud can either come from ad networks or website owners.
Ad networks have much to gain from click fraud. By engaging in this activity, the links of those who use them to advertise will be clicked numerous times unnecessarily. These clicks will be included in monitors that produce the invoice for their clients. Since their clients are charged with the amount of click monitored multiplied by the rate per click, this makes it appear legitimate for them to charge substantial amounts.
On the other side of the token, website owners themselves also engage in this type of activity because of the advantage it brings in terms of profits. Those who include advertisements in their web pages exert extra effort (whether manually or automatically) to increase the clicks to the advertisements they display. Although these advertisements were placed in order to be visible to website users, the owners of these websites carefully manipulate the number of clicks to their favor. Similar to ad networks, this allows them to charge advertisers more and therefore, increase profits.
It is often very difficult to track cases of click fraud. Many anti-click fraud security utilities have been developed. However, these security utilities simply try to trace illegitimate clicks by tracking patterns. Some trace the amount of time spent by the “clicker” on the website whose link they followed. Because of the criteria through which these security utilities are programmed to determine illegitimate clicks, it is now easily hoodwinked.
The people who are employed to do this kind of work have been trained well enough to deceive even the best of anti-click fraud technology. Scripts have been coded to imitate legitimate users very well. Even software has been given provisions for anti-click fraud programs in their development.
