What Is Click Fraud?If you're using PPC advertising, or thinking about using it, you definitely need to know about click fraud before you go any further. You may have heard a few things about click fraud before. So what is it? Click fraud, as a basic definition, is any attempt to imitate a legitimate browser user clicking on an advert. The sheer sophistication of computer technology means there are many different ways and methods that the fraudsters can follow, and it often seems close to impossible to differentiate them from legitimate users. Click fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions, so right from the start you should be aware that this is serious business, and serious crime. Why Do Fraudsters Do It? An advert publisher (for example on a personal blog or website) will get paid by the advertising network each time a visitor clicks on an advert. Pay per click advertising is heavily monetized and for certain topics, a publisher could receive more than ten dollars for each click. It should be easy to see the problem with this system - the publisher has been given a big incentive to click on his own links in order to imitate other users. This is normally low level fraud, as the average website owner only has one computer, and therefore can only click a few links before his fraud becomes incredibly easy to spot. However, some fraudsters have much greater resources at their disposal (which they have often also gained through fraudulent or illegal methods), and they are able to perpetrate click fraud on a massive scale, without being easily caught. There is another, more subtle reason for click fraud. Many people use click fraud who do not directly gain from the click, simply in order to harm their competition. If you, as a business, can deplete the advertising budget of your competitors, you have a commercial advantage. Why Don't They Stop Click Fraud? Since click fraud is obviously harming the profits of advertisers. why don't they do anything about it? The reason click fraud is often a controversial issue is because the organizations who are best placed to do something about it are the advertising networks, who profit from the illegal activity. The biggest advertising network in the world of the internet is Google, who have two programs set up to deal with adverts. AdWords shows adverts on the right hand side of the search engine results pages, and AdSense acts as the middle man to provide adverts for other websites to publish. Every time an advert on either the AdWords or the Adsense program is clicked, Google profits. In fact these adverts account for almost all of Google's revenue. This means that Google also has a huge incentive to allow click fraud, and to play down its impact to the larger advertising community. Click fraud has increasingly become big business, and if you're looking to spend some of your hard earned money on pay per click advertising, then you need to make sure that you have the best tools at your disposal to fight it. |
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| AdWatcher | 9.3 |
| HitsLink | 6.4 |
| HyperTracker | 6.4 |
| WhosClickingWho | 6.4 |
| DynaTracker | 6.2 |
| ConversionRuler | 6.3 |
| AdTrackz | 5.9 |
| AdMinder | 5.1 |
| ROIWiz | 5 |
| ClickAlyzer | 1.6 |
| ProAnalyzer | 0 |
