What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is considered as an online crime since it aims to deceive advertisers on the Internet. This crime works in pay per click advertising where advertisers pay a certain amount every time a visitor clicks an ad or banner that they have set up in websites. Normally, pay per click advertising is a way for operators of websites to earn revenues from advertisements that they have set up on websites they maintain. Click fraud abuses this online revenue generating scheme in a unique way.

What is ppc?

Pay per click advertising is a legal service being offered online. It works as an arrangement between webmasters and advertisers wherein webmasters place a clickable link on websites that leads to an advertiser's own website. Every click made on the said link is charged a certain fee that the advertiser pays.

As the pay per click advertising industry evolved further, a number of advertising networks have cropped up that became the middlemen between the advertisers and the operators of websites. In this set up, the advertisers pay through the advertising networks that promotes the service. The fee paid is then shared between the advertising network and the webmaster or publisher.

What is click frand?

The pay per click advertising method works best if only there are valid visitors who click into the links and provide effective market reach in the online world. But this system of reaching the online market can be abused where in a person, an automated script or a computer program repeatedly clicks on a certain ad numerous times to generate a charge per click that advertisers have the burden of paying for.

In this way, an artificial means of generating revenue is created. Click fraud deceives advertisers to thinking that a lot of people are clicking on their links or ads when in fact it is being done only by a certain individual or a computer program.

Click fraud can also be committed by a person or group that is not in any way connected with contracting parties in a pay per click advertising agreement. Click fraud may be used by competitors of advertisers.

A competitor in the same advertising market can also click on an ad by another competitor to heap up the irrelevant click charges that can weaken them. Click fraud can also be used on publishers to discredit them. Clicks can be made to look like the publisher clicks on its own ads. When an advertising network discovers this, their agreement on revenue sharing may be terminated.

Click fraud can also be used for malicious intent with no aim for profit whatsoever. It can be used against an advertiser or a publisher in order to cause nuisance or become a source of annoyance. Sometimes, friends of certain a party in pay per click advertising (either of the publisher or the advertiser) may repeatedly click on ads as a means to help generate revenue without the knowledge of either the advertiser or publisher.