Understanding What Click Fraud Is In Contextual Marketing
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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 added PPC companies substantial and small are at the moment sucking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable assessment of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the Pay Per Click marketing arena has not unsurprisingly attracted armies of scam artists whose tricks have the capability to honestly erode consumer confidence.
Click fraud happens when a person, automated script, or computer software application imitates a legal consumer of a internet browser clicking on an ad for the objective of generating a charge per click without having real interest in the target product or service of the ad’s link. Despite the fact that it is hard to watch and keep under control, a number of search engines have developed automated systems that endeavor to protect against these practices with varying degrees of effectiveness, but still the most highly developed of them are not infallible.
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:
Advertising competitors – By deliberately clicking on their competitors ads (in so doing forcing them to shell out for worthless clicks) they can weaken them or worse yet put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from this type of click fraud.
Publishing Competitors – Publishers may endeavor to frame their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own ads, with their end game being that the advertising network terminates their account.
Malice – Like the types of people who knowingly develop and then email computer viruses, some will engage in click fraud not for monetary benefit merely to make a publisher and/or advertiser look bad for whatever reason.
Friendship – Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers learn that their friend’s business profits when their ads are clicked on, they may 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 attempt to stop fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are real and which are not. Usually 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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