What is click fraud? I just did a quick Bing search for click fraud which returned over 17 million results. It’s actually a cybercrime dating back years that occurs with PPC advertising when a spammer or some program or script imitates a real user clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an actual charge per click, even though they have no interest in the target of that ad’s link.

Have you ever noticed in your PPC advertising campaigns, the same IP address clicking on your ad, spending one or two seconds on your website and then leaving? And coming back again within seconds? If you’re spending $3.00 per click, that adds up quickly.

The Trend

Click fraud has been on the rise lately, with third and fourth quarter ’09 seeing huge jumps. This is generally attributed to very sophisticated rings of click fraudsters leveraging bots to automate and coordinate high volume traffic from click fraud rings.

What’s the Motivation?

One motivator is competitor click fraud. The motivation of the perpetrator here is to simply obtain higher-placed ad positions for lower bid amounts by depleting the advertising budget of their competitors. Other motivators of click fraud include financial gain, revenge and blackmail.

What can you do to detect and prevent click fraud?

This starts with being proactive – measuring your advertising results, analyzing trends in click volumes with or without accompanying increases in your website’s traffic or sales.

There are also anti-fraud softwares to protect your advertising dollars. A quick check on Google for FREE click fraud software returned over 1.3 million results.

We do alot of ppc work and have found the click fraud on content networks is now over 50%. We have stopped using content networks and only allow our listings to be displayed within search results.

Yeah, we no longer use the Content Networks for our main sites either - we get TONS of exposure, but there's a lot of fraud in it.

From what I've heard, Google has some very good click fraud detection tools and methods in place (same as they use for detecting click fraud on Adsense). I don't know about the other search engines, though.

I think Google does a very good job at combating this problem. I'm not sure about the other search engines though.

It's unfortunate people go to this length to try to affect one another. I've also found it true that with content networks the clicks come out of no where with little to no conversion.

I do think they are doing the best they can (Google anyways), after all if they don't serve the purpose of the advertisers, they will lose them and in turn affect their own sales.

Basically click fraud is defined as any paid for clicks that initiate for advertise budgets. Sometimes it also motivated as income by payperclick affiliate networks generator. Almost all search engines recognize click fraud and it won’t charge for fraud clicks.

True. I've read about this somewhere in the web too. Google actually is doing a good job in detecting fraud clickers!