Understanding What Click Fraud Is In Contextual Marketing
Pay Per Click or the abbreviated version “PPC” is a mode of Internet advertising that is utilized on web sites (like blogs for example) as well as search engines and ad networks. Promoters post ad content with a number of such web hosts and the host is remunerated only if and when their ad is clicked. The words “pay per click” literally means what it declares: the Vendor pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad.
Google, Yahoo! and all the additional Pay Per Click network companies large and small are now picking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable gauge of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the PPC world has not unsurprisingly appealed to armies of scam artists whose behavior have the ability to genuinely erode consumer confidence.
Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a actual customer of a internet browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having genuine interest in the target product of the ad’s link. Despite the fact that it is hard to police and keep under control, some search engines have created automated systems that try to shield against these practices with varying degrees of effectiveness, but still the most highly developed of them are not infallible.
Further complicating the situation is the fact that the advertisers themselves benefit financially from such fraud. The biggest networks play 2 roles, as PPC providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can create conflicts of interest. For instance, whilst a PPC network will lose money to click fraud when it makes payment to a publisher, it more than makes up for it when it collects money from an advertiser, so indirectly, the PPC Network profits from click fraud.
Click fraud can be something as straightforward as starting a trivial Web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to generate revenue. Frequently the amount of clicks and their value is so tiny that the fraud goes undetected. Larger-sized frauds involve running scripts which simulate a human clicking on advertisements in web pages on a extensive scale.
Another cause of click fraud is what are known as non-contracting parties, these parties are not part of any pay-per-click agreement.
Some examples of non-contracting parties are:
Marketing competitors – By knowingly clicking on their competitors ads (by this means they are forcing them to shell out for worthless clicks) they can disrupt their business activities or worse yet put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from the click fraud.
Publishing Competitors – Publishers may endeavor to frame their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own ads, with their end game being that the advertising network terminates their account.
Malice – Like the types of individuals who intentionally exploit and then email computer viruses, some will take part in click fraud not for monetary gain simply to make a publisher and/or advertiser look bad for which ever reason.
Friendship – Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers realize that their friend’s business makes money when their ads are clicked, they may possibly decide to do so themselves, thinking that they are helping out. If they overdo it however, they can do more harm than good when the publisher is accused of being involved with click fraud and has their account closed.
While advertising networks make every effort to end fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are legitimate. More often than not the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.
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