Understanding What Click Fraud Is In Contextual Marketing
Pay Per Click or the abbreviated version “PPC” is a mode of Internet advertising that is utilized on web sites (like blogs for example) as well as search engines and ad networks. Promoters post ad content with a number of such web hosts and the host is remunerated only if and when their ad is clicked. The words “pay per click” literally means what it declares: the Vendor pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad.
Google, Yahoo! and all the additional Pay Per Click network companies large and small are now picking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable gauge of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the PPC world has not unsurprisingly appealed to armies of scam artists whose behavior have the ability to genuinely erode consumer confidence.
Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer software application 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 product of the ad’s link. Though hard to police and keep under control, some search engines have built automated systems which try to defend against these practices with different degrees of effectiveness, but still the most sophisticated of them are not without problems.
Further complicating the situation is the fact that the advertisers themselves benefit financially from such fraud. The biggest networks play 2 roles, as PPC providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can create conflicts of interest. For instance, whilst a PPC network will lose money to click fraud when it makes payment to a publisher, it more than makes up for it when it collects money from an advertiser, so indirectly, the PPC Network profits from click fraud.
Click fraud can be something as rudimentary as creating a trivial Web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to produce revenue. Often the amount of clicks and their value is so trivial that the fraud goes unnoticed. Larger-sized frauds entail running scripts which which try to make it look like a human clicking on advertisements in web pages on a widespread scale.
Another source of click fraud is what are known as non-contracting parties, these parties are not part of any pay-per-click agreement.
Here are a few instances of non-contracting parties are:
Marketing competitors – By knowingly clicking on their competitors ads (by this means they are forcing them to pay for worthless clicks) they can weaken them or even put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from this type of click fraud.
Publishing Competitors – Publishers may attempt to set up their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own PPC advertisements, with their end result hoping to be that the advertising network cancels their account.
Malice – Like the types of people who knowingly exploit and then email computer viruses, some will engage in click fraud not for financial benefit but simply to make a publisher or advertiser look bad for whatever reason.
Friendship – Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers realize that their friend’s business makes money when their ads are clicked, they may possibly decide to do so themselves, thinking that they are helping out. If they overdo it however, they can do more harm than good when the publisher is accused of being involved with click fraud and has their account closed.
While advertising networks make every effort to end fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are legitimate. More often than not the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.
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