How to Deal with Click Fraud

Summary for: How to Deal with Click Fraud

Click fraud causes the most severe penalty (account banning). Publishers should be on the watch, for they are unprotected against it. Even if not guilty, publishers get penalized as they have the duty to take their measures against this and monitor closely the activity in their AdSense™ accounts.

Being aware of its existence is essential but it's not enough, the key-solution is constant monitoring: you just have to be on the watch of your own web advertising activity, either you are an advertiser or a publisher.

What Is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is an illegal practise through which false clicks on PPC advertisments are generated, with the purpose of swerving advertising data, with no possibility whatsoever for a conversion to occur. That is, purely stealing from advertisers who pay for each click. Fraudulent clicks are also referred to as “invalid”, “malicious” or “artificial”.

The main trigger-reasons are:

• when competitors want to run up a bill for an advertiser;
• when CPC affiliates want to increase per-click commissions on the traffic they generate for the ads.
• when hackers create software that perform fraudulent clicks and use it to threaten various companies in order to obtain money; (extortion)
• when it is done by former or discontent employees. (vengeance)

How Is It Done?

• Manually generated clicks - Where surfers are paid to click on paid-ads on their employer’s websites or on his competitors' sites.
• Automated methods - Software applications or “hitbots”, designed to click on paid ads.

Once an invalid activity tracked, Google™'s position is as follows:

• Advertisers are not charged for clicks or impressions that were identified as fraudulent. Or refunds are made if the case.
• Publishers are not judged starting from the assumption of innocence and are severely penalized without much debate: AdSense™ account dismantled. They give no guarantee for the possibility of account reinstatement although they state their opening for discussion, considering the possibility of sabotage.

Most of us are just as frightened as the advertisers to become so, for click fraud is the primary reason (and the most serious one) for Google™ to disable AdSense™ accounts. And, while advertisers are usually refunded in such cases, AdSense™ publishers are banned without possibility of account reinstatement.

What Actions Can Be Interpreted as Click Fraud?

• The first sign that could be read as suspect would be an abnormal rise in CTR in a very short period of time (on one day for example)
• A grave mistake would be for the webmaster to intentionally click on his own site ads.
• Also, incentives to click are penalized as sterile clicks inducers.
• Including ads on registration or error pages may be considered as click fraud generator (as, being on such a page, the user would have no other choice than to click on your ads).

Source: How to Deal with Click Fraud