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 fo.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 o.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 he.competitors may deplete the daily budget by clicking repeatedly on the sponsored links. After depleting the daily budget, only th.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 b.committed by manually clicking on ads or b.computer programs. .computer program performing the clicking can operate from on.computer or may be distributed across man.computers on the internet for exampl.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 you.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 .computer program is run from a singl.computer that generates a large number of clicks, this is fairly easy to detect. By analysing the logs files which your hostin.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 distribute.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 tha.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 hostin.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 .computer t.commit this type of fraud is a crime in many jurisdictions, for example as covered by Penal code 502 in California and th.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:
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
weblogexpert.com. Program for analysing the raw log files provided by your hostin.company. WeblogExpert provides a free version with limited functionality and as well as a full version with additional functionality.
About the Author:
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