What to Do About Click Fraud

Click Fraud

What Is Click Fraud?

A formal definition of click fraud is, “the act of clicking on a search engine sponsored listing or banner ad with the intention of increasing clicks that deplete the advertiser’s
pay-per-click budget.”

A more succinct definition is this: Click fraud is theft, pure and simple!

Pay-per-click marketers and the industry in general don’t think that click fraud will undermine the entire pay-per-click market. But click fraud does occur, and it does diminish the success rate of many online marketing campaigns.

Click fraud is an industry-wide problem. It’s not just large merchants, or small merchants, or affiliate marketers who are being affected by the click fraud problem. Click fraud is an equal opportunity problem that is affecting the entire PPC advertising venue.

Why Does Click Fraud Happen?

As Internet marketers we all do our best to make friends and influence people. Along the way, however, we inevitably make enemies. In business, there are always winners and losers. Sometimes those who lose and are less than happy with us will instigate a click fraud attack simply for the purpose of "getting even."

Our competitors sometimes have a severe "green-eyed monster" attack and will launch a click-fraud campaign out
of nothing more than jealousy. What better way to narrow the gap than to increase the advertising costs of a
competitor? Click fraud is a method used by jealous competitors to reduce the balance of his competitor’s bank account without having to rob the bank — but it is still theft, and it is still illegal.

Sometimes affiliates are paid a commission for each click generated on a merchant’s advertisement on the affiliate’s own website. There are some greedy affiliate marketers who instigate fraudulent clicks on the merchant’s PPC
advertisements in order to increase their own income.

Anger, jealousy, and money are all very good motives for click fraud.

How Does Click Fraud Happen?

Of course, some of those who engage in click fraud simply manually click on their competitor’s pay-per-click advertisements themselves repeatedly. They know that each time they click, their competitor is being charged and is thus losing money by being required to pay for useless clicks.

But it’s pretty simple to identify many clicks from the same IP address. There are always "fingerprints," so to speak, left with each click on a PPC advertisement. Fraudulent clickers have been caught and prosecuted.

Sometimes foreign workers are hired to instigate fraudulent clicks either on a competitor’s PPC advertisement or on advertisements from which an affiliate is earning an income.

Fraudulent clickers have gone high tech, too. The more sophisticated unethical marketers have developed techniques that are designed to outwit honest and unsuspecting PPC advertisers by depleting their budgets and/or daily allocations, or
by reducing return on investment in an attempt to take the top position for sponsored links.

Both cloaking and spider technologies are out there, and they are being used to instigate fraudulent clicks on PPC advertisements.

A click fraud perpetrator might access the Internet using a single IP address, or block of IP addresses, while fraudulently clicking on your ads. They can cloak or disguise their IP address (like a spammer using a fake "reply to" address) so it appears that your PPC ads are being accessed from many different IP addresses.

Another click fraud program that’s very popular among these crooks is one that uses spider technology. Spiders (released by fraudulent clickers) crawl the Internet looking for competitor’s pay-per-click ads, and then automatically generate bogus clicks on the sponsored link.

Identifying Click Fraud

There’s one sure way to identify fraudulent clicks. Monitoring your site visitors from pay-per-click marketing and establishing baseline visitor behavior, unusual patterns will become apparent immediately.

Conversion rates: If you know what your usual conversion rates are (how many clicks it takes to get a conversion), you’ll be able to identify deviations. Deviations indicate click fraud.

Clicks by country: A sudden explosion in clicks from a foreign country may indicate that you’re the victim of click fraud.

Repeated visits from the same IP address: This isn’t always an indication of click fraud, but when the information is combined with other statistics, you could see a pattern that indicated click fraud.

Page depth: An overly frequent visitor who never looks at any page other than your home page could also be a good indication of click fraud.

Time on site: Return visitors spend more time on a website. If the time spent on your site is too short to be humanly generated, that’s also a good tip off of click fraud.

Acceptance of cookies: This is another stat that can tell you a lot. Some bots use browser-less technology to crawl the web, so they don’t accept cookies. About 95% of your visitors will accept cookies. Less than that indicates click fraud.

Clicks at odd hours: The Internet is always open for business, of course, but an unusual number of clicks at odd hours will likely indicate that those clicks are coming from time zones on the other side of the world and could be an indication of click fraud.

Reporting Click Fraud

Fraudulent clicks hurt everybody. They hurt the marketers and advertisers who pay for PPC advertising first, but they also hurt the customer. Advertising costs are always passed on to the consumer, so fraudulent clicks can result in higher prices. Furthermore, if search results are skewed, customers will find it much more difficult to find what they are looking for. The search engines can also be hurt.

It is in the best interest of search engines to alleviate the fraudulent click problem. You might think, "The search engines are getting paid for real AND fraudulent clicks, so why should they care?" They do care.

If click fraud reduces the relevance of the search results provided by the search engines, or results in advertising costs that marketers can’t afford, ad revenues for the search engines will decrease. Search engines are the ones who will suffer the most from click fraud, so it really is in their best interest to eliminate fraudulent clicks on PPC advertisements.

Most of the respected search engines acknowledge the click fraud problem and are actively reviewing suspicious activity. When click fraud is uncovered, the more respected networks are automatically making refunds to PPC advertisers.

Of course, ultimately it is up to you to discover click fraud that’s being perpetrated against you, and it’s up to you to report this illegal activity to the search engines. It’s also up to you to be persistent enough to get any refund that is due you.

Here’s what you do:

1. Gather your information from your statistics as outlined above.

2. Write a paragraph of two outlining the reasons why you believe fraudulent clicks have occurred based upon the statistics from step 1.

3. Use the statistics and the paragraphs that you have written to present the information to compose an email to send to the search engine where the click fraud occurred. (Make sure that you include all pertinent data and that your explanation is clear, concise and complete.)

Next, you wait. A day or so may go by, but then you will probably get an email from the search engine.

If the search engine is one of the larger and more respected ones, they will probably tell you that they have instigated an active investigation into the matter and in a few days (or weeks) they will issue a credit for the fraudulent clicks that you were
charged for.

However, not all search engines are large or respected. These smaller search engines are usually much less responsive to a fraudulent click problem. It’s likely that you’ll be told that the search engine doesn’t see a problem and that there will be
no refund forthcoming.

Don’t take "no" for an answer if you know that you’ve been a victim of click fraud. Be persistent. Ask for clarification. Demand answers.

If you think that you have been a victim of click fraud, remember that your advertising dollars are at stake.

Be patient but be very persistent, and stay with the problem until you get the refund that is due you.

Click Fraud Technology

Several different vendors have come out with click fraud detection software programs. Some of these sophisticated statistical models can analyze your site activity and actually “predict” potential click fraud behavior. Your first line of defense is always your own diligence, but this technology can help identify click fraud that could go undetected by the human eye.

Professional services are also available to monitor your PPC campaigns and act as a kind of "early warning system" of potential click fraud as it happens.

Conclusion

Click fraud hurts everyone associated with the industry — merchants, advertisers, customers, and even the pay-per-click search engines themselves. Because it affects all of us, we all need to actively work toward eliminating the click fraud problem.

About the Author

Kathy Jackson is a Texas rancher and a contrib uting author for several farm and ranch publications. She is also an experienced freelance writer of email newsletters, review copy, educational materials, and blog posts on a wide variety of topics, including many aspects of online business and affiliate marketing. Internet marketing is one of Kathy’s burning interests. You can read some of Kathy’s articles on the Affiliate Classroom Blog at http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/. She can be contacted via email at jacksokathy@gmail.com .

What to Do About Click Fraud