Click Fraud: Should I be Worried?

By Aisling Brennan
Account Director

Although online advertising continues to be the driving force of the advertising industry, there's a black cloud on the horizon in the vein of click fraud.

In light of Google’s recent $90m click fraud settlement with Lane’s Gifts which garnered lots of unwanted media attention for the company and industry, I want to address click fraud this month. What exactly is click fraud, and should I as an Internet marketer be concerned about it?

So, What is Click Fraud?
Yahoo! defines click fraud as, "clicks arising for reasons other than the good-faith intention of an Internet user to visit a Web site to purchase goods or services or to obtain information". Google is a bit more specific, defining click fraud, or invalid clicks, "as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions". Examples of invalid clicks include: manual clicks on an ad to purposefully increase the ad spend; deliberate clicks on an ad to increase profits by site owners hosting the ads; and automated clicking tools, 'bots, or other deceptive software.

All the major PPC networks have proprietary anti-click fraud technology, which they refine on an ongoing basis. All keep their system details secret for security reasons. Yahoo's system combines proprietary systems, filtering technologies, and human intervention. Google uses its own proprietary technology to analyse clicks to determine whether they fit a pattern of activity intended to artificially drive up an advertiser's costs.

The motives for click fraud vary. Most often, it’s to generate money from ads on their own sites. However increasingly, fraudsters target the ads of their competitors to drain their marketing budgets. It can be perpetrated in automate and human ways. The most common method is the use of online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links that are displayed on Web sites or listed in search queries. A growing alternative employs low-cost workers to click on text links and other ads. A third form of fraud takes place when employees of companies click on rivals' ads to deplete their marketing budgets and skew search results.

What Can I Do to Prevent Click Fraud?
Analyse your log files regularly. How long did a particular visitor stay on a site? How many pages did a particular visitor view? Were there many repeat visitors from the same IP address? Or hits from anonymous proxy servers? If a page is turned every second over a short period of time, for example, fraud-detecting systems will flag the traffic as suspiciously uniform. These fraud-detection systems, Coremetrics and Whosclickingwho.com, help advertisers analyse their campaigns and traffic more indepthly--use them.

There are also a number of tests (number of pageviews per user session, visitors per IP, paid clicks per IP, sessions without cookies, pageview frequency per second,  anonymous proxy server monitoring, geographic origin, etc.) you can conduct to see if you have a click fraud problem. However before you embark on such an exhaustive click fraud test remember that competitive, expensive keywords remain a high-profile target for fraudsters. It's a good idea to diversify and bid on the largest possible number of well-researched, lower-cost keywords.

Alert the PPC networks of any suspicious activity and they'll investigate further. Google and other search networks provide refunds to advertisers when click fraud has been discovered. Work with them; they're as anxious as the advertisers to catch these fraudsters.

Remember that click fraud hurts everyone except the cheaters. Let's ensure they don't win in the long term.