Click Fraud And What To Do About It

Click fraud is the practise of clicking on pay-per-click ads

for the purpose of generating income for the clicker or to

incur costs for competitors.

A website may have a number of ads which generate a small

income for each click on each ad. The costs for such ads may

be paid directly by the advertiser to the owner of the

website or may be paid through sponsored links provided by

Google or other search engines. The owner of a website owner

may generate income for the website simply by manually

clicking on ads multiple times every day. An automated

script or computer program may also be used to generate

clicks and such automation can generate a large amount of

traffic.

Several websites may use the same keywords to advertise in

Googles AdWords program. The administrators of each website

may make a bid for the keywords and set a daily limit for

the amount of money spent on clicks. If a website

administrator has set a daily limit for clicks, then his or

her competitors may deplete the daily budget by clicking

repeatedly on the sponsored links. After depleting the daily

budget, only the competitors ads are shown and generate

traffic for real visitors.

Click fraud can therefore cost you and knowing how to detect

it can save you money.

As mentioned above, click fraud may be committed by manually

clicking on ads or by computer programs. A computer program

performing the clicking can operate from one computer or may

be distributed across many computers on the internet - for

example computers that are remote controlled by hackers.

Detecting click fraud can be relatively easy or difficult

depending on the extent to which it is performed and the way

it is done. If your competitor clicks on your ads on Google

a few times per day, you are unlikely to be able to discern

this from legitimate clicks performed by potential

customers. If however a computer program is run from a

single computer that generates a large number of clicks,

this is fairly easy to detect. By analysing the logs files

which your hosting company make available, you will be able

to detect a sudden large amount of traffic originating from

one particular IP address. If however click fraud is being

perpetrated from a network of distributed computers then

detection is more challenging. The first sign you will

notice is that traffic to your website has increased for no

apparent reason. Detection is based on the fact that

computer programs are more likely to behave in a repetitive

fashion than human beings.

Here is what you need to look for:

* Do you suddenly have a lot of traffic originating from a

certain website or search engine?

* Has the traffic to your website changed, so you suddenly

receive more traffic from certain browsers or operating

systems?

* Have the paths of your visitors suddenly changed for no

particular reason, for example so more visitors now visit

only the entry page?

* Is a smaller percentage of your visitors suddenly buying

your products or signing up to your service?

If you believe that you may be the victim of click fraud you

may contact your hosting company and ask for their help. If

you are using sponsored links with one of the search engines

you may contact the support at the search engines and they

can help you with investigation. Use of a computer to commit

this type of fraud is a crime in many jurisdictions, for

example as covered by Penal code 502 in California and the

Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. If you are

the victim of click fraud then report it to the appropriate

authorities.

Useful links:

www.statcounter.com

Statistics for your website. By placing a small piece of

code on your web pages statcounter tracks your traffic and

generates statistics for it

www.weblogexpert.com

Program for analysing the raw log files provided by your

hosting company. WeblogExpert provides a free version with

limited functionality and as well as a full version with

additional functionality.

You have permission to publish this article electronically

or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are

included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be

appreciated.

About the Author:

Andrew Nielsen is the author of

"The Online Business

Builder"

He is an internet entrepreneur and is currently

helping online business start ups getting on their feet.

Visit http://www.i-want-to-be-rich.com or mailto:

an@i-want-to-be-rich.com

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