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How Click Fraud Affects Different Roles In The Advertising Industry


Click fraud can affect anyone in any position within the advertising community, but it is clear that the people who are the most affected are the advertisers themselves. If you are putting some money into a pay per click advertising campaign, then you should be aware of the risks involved. In particular, the biggest victims are the smaller advertising companies and individuals, who do not have as much clout within the system, and who are unable to devote masses of resources to research and developing solutions for themselves. Some actually benefit from the crime, as you will see.

Advert publishers

A large section of click fraud is created by advert publishers clicking on links published on their own websites. They obviously profit from this method, and there are very few scams around which act in such a way that they would hurt the publishers. These people have no real need to worry about click fraud themselves, and are unlikely to find themselves victims of it in any way.

Advertising Networks

If a fake click successfully makes its way through the system without being picked up, the click is charged as normal and the advertising network responsible will profit from it. This is a cause of major concern within the industry. Search engines and other advertising networks are in the best place possible to police click fraud, but they have a vested interest in allowing as much of it as would be undetectable. While the search engines have made public their efforts to cut click fraud out of the picture, many advertisers feel that they cannot trust advertising networks to do the job to the best of their ability. Advertising networks will normally profit from click fraud, but if they are not seen to be doing enough to combat it, their credibility will be harmed and they will lose advertisers as a result.

Advertisers

Advertisers are the real victims of PPC fraud. Every time that a fraudulent click makes it all the way through the system without being noticed, an advertiser will lose money for that click. They cannot profit from it, and they will undoubtedly lose from it to some extent. The problem is that no one knows for sure just how much click fraud is going on, so it is hard to give an exact figure for how much the advertisers are out of pocket. Because of this situation, in many cases it is the advertisers themselves who have taken positive action to guard against click fraud.

Ad Trackers

PPC tracking software is a tool that advertisers can use to minimize their losses. Good versions of ad tracking software have click fraud protection, which means they act as PPC detectives, searching for invalid links that they can report. With more and more big companies spending their advertising dollars on online pay per click, the monitoring of those adverts is getting better and better.

If you want to avoid getting cheated out of your advertising budget, you need to be using ad tracking software in conjunction with your pay per click campaigns.