Click Fraud
Click fraud is an illegal practice that occurs when individuals click on a website’s click through advertisements (either banner ads or paid text links) to increase the payable number of clicks to the advertiser. The illegal clicks could either be performed by having a person manually click the advertising hyperlinks or by using automated software or online bots that are programmed to click these banner ads and pay per click text ad links.
Research has indicated that click fraud is perpetrated by individuals who use click fraud to increase their own personal banner ad revenues and also by companies who use click fraud as a way to deplete a competitor’s advertising budget. Click fraud is commonly associated with pay-per click advertising (PPC).
Click Fraud or Invalid Clicks?
The phrase invalid clicks is similar to click fraud, however in addition to clicks that is intentionally fraudulent, invalid clicks also includes accidental clicks and other mechanically generated traffic that are not the result of genuine user clicks. Invalid clicks can be a costly for advertisers. Large advertising networks typically analyze and validate clicks on behalf of the advertiser. When invalid clicks are detected they are flagged and automatically filtered from reports and payments. In some cases, refunds may be issued.
Click Fraud Firewall and Monitoring
To counter click fraud there are a number of firewall, blocking and monitoring tools and services available. For example, an AdSense Plugin for Google AdSense can help vendors who encounter malicious or unintended third party clicks on website advertisements. The plugin is designed to block visitors from seeing ads when they click multiple times on them.
Other monitoring systems inspect the quality of every ad click to determine if the clicks are excessive non-converting clicks from specific countries or a competitor clicking your ads.
Read Also:
- click-through
The process of a visitor clicking on a Web advertisement and going to the advertiser’s Web site. Also called ad clicks or requests. The click rate measures the amount of times an ad is clicked versus the amount of times it’s viewed. See “How Affiliate Marketing Works” in the “Did You Know…” section of
- CTR
Short for click-through rate, the ratio of the number of times a user clicks on an online advertisement per number of viewers who view the Web site that has the advertisement on it. For example, if one out of 100 people who visit a specific Web site click on an advertisement and are taken to […]
- clickjack attack
Clickjacking, or clickjack attack, is a vulnerability used by an attacker to collect an infected user’s clicks. The attacker can force the user to do all sort of things from adjusting the user’s computer settings to unwittingly sending the user to Web sites that might have malicious code. Also, by taking advantage of Adobe Flash […]
- clickstream
A virtual trail that a user leaves behind while surfing the Internet. A clickstream is a record of a user’s activity on the Internet, including every Web site and every page of every Web site that the user visits, how long the user was on a page or site, in what order the pages were […]
- Client
(klī´&nt) (n.) The client part of a client-server architecture. Typically, a client is an application that runs on a personal computer or workstation and relies on a server to perform some operations. For example, an e-mail client is an application that enables you to send and receive e-mail.