Click Fraud In Pay-per-click Search Engines

There's no doubt that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a very profitable and cost-effective way to provide your website with targeted visitors. Thousands of companies world wide are successfully advertising on pay-per-click search engines. However, recently a big problem reared its ugly head, which advertisers need to deal with to ensure the continued success of their ad campaign. That problem is click fraud.

What is click fraud?
Click fraud is the practice of inflating traffic to advertisements or websites for profit. With each click of a sponsored text link, pay-per-click search engines collect fees from advertisers, and then often share that revenue with publishing partners that display those ads. It is no wonder that most of the click fraud is committed by those partner websites that are interested in artificially increasing traffic they can deliver. There are several ways that click fraud can be committed: Many pay-per-click search engines have partners network of hundreds of small directories, search engines, and content sites which are supposed to deliver traffic to given pay-per-click search engine. Sometimes these smaller websites actually run scripts which continuously click on the ads or they hire teams of people from 3rd world countries to click on the ads. Naturally, those people are not interested in the product or service advertisers are selling, so they won?t see any ROI from those clicks. Due to the intense competition on many keywords, price per click is usually fairly high. Keeping that in mind, some competitors might try to click on your ads in order to deplete your advertising budget.

Is click fraud happening to me?
Depending on how much you spend on PPC advertising, you may or may not feel the results of click fraud. Although the extent of click fraud is impossible to measure with any certainty, some believe that up to 20 percent of all traffic coming from pay-per-click search engines is illegitimate. It is fairly easy to detect click fraud by paying attention to the following: Your traffic patterns. If you have not made any changes to your campaigns, but see a sudden increase in traffic from your pay-per-click advertising, it might possibly be a result of click fraud. Your website traffic logs. Check your traffic logs on daily basis and pay attention to the amount of traffic coming from a single IP address. If you notice that a lot of traffic is coming from similar IP, it should raise a red flag. I?ve detected click fraud. What should I do?

There is no need to panic or get angry at your pay-per-click search engine. Search engines fall victim to click fraud just like the advertisers. Save a copy of your traffic logs and contact the search engines. In most cases PPC search engines simply credit your account with the amount you think was stolen, as long as you can prove it.

What is being done to combat click fraud?
Pay-per-click search engines are currently taken many measures against click fraud. Now most search engines offer what is known as a click frequency cap which places a limited on the amount of clicks that could be done in a given period of time. This usually eliminates most of the bots that click on your ads. Major search engines also offers daily spending caps which limit the amount of money you spend per day. Also, ask if the pay-per-click search engine you are advertising with has a country filter. If you are an American company, it is not likely that you are going to need traffic from Eastern Europe, Africa and many Asian countries. There are also services like ClickLab which monitor your advertising campaigns and look for click fraud and will warn you as soon as it is detected.

Whatever method of click fraud prevention and detection you choose, click fraud will continue to exist. It is important to understand that fraud is a problem for both advertisers and PPC search engines and the only way to combat click fraud is to work together in detecting and fighting it.