Click fraud constitutes one of the most serious problems in online advertising. In most cases, most of the damage perpetrated by click fraud is monetary. It results in advertisers losing money by paying for fraudulent clicks that have no hope of being converted into legitimate sales. Still, not all these frauds are about money first.
Perpetrators sometimes engage in click fraud for malicious purposes. Whether it’s on mobile, setting up a click farm or fraud bot, or even paying employees to click on competitors’ ads, malice is a big part of this particular crime.
So how do website owners and advertisers combat these? A good place to start is with click fraud detection software. One of the leading software packages on the market is Fraud Blocker. In addition to deploying it, advertisers can implement certain digital marketing strategies that rely on analytics to give an accurate picture of how ads are doing.
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Malice Against Advertisers
It should be noted that click fraud is perpetrated through pay-per-click (PPC) ads. When money is the direct motivation, you generally have an ad publisher or network generating fraudulent leads simply to drive revenues. But when malice is the motivation, you are looking at a broader range of strategies for causing harming.
When it comes to malice against advertisers, it is often direct competitors or their agents perpetrating click fraud. For the record, advertisers are the companies or organizations actually paying for the ads. They are small businesses and large corporations alike.
Every Click Costs Money
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The nature of PPC advertising is such that every click costs the advertiser money. If an advertiser pays $.25 for every click of an ad built on certain keywords, 1,000 clicks would cost that advertiser $250. Ten would cost $2.50.
Using these simple numbers, it is easy to understand how a company or individual could perpetrate click fraud for malicious purposes. A company could direct some of its staff members to spend a few hours maliciously clicking on competitor ads. Every action runs up the advertising bill. Every click means another charge that has no hope of generating an actual sale.
As disturbing as the practice is, malicious click fraud perpetrated by companies against their competitors is a very real thing. It probably happens more often than anyone knows for the simple fact that no one has taken the time to compile relevant data.
Malice Against Publishers
Pay-per-click fraud may be perpetrated against publishers rather than advertisers. A publisher is a third-party organization that gets paid to run ads on its own sites or mobile platforms. Advertisers sometimes work with publishers because they can get more ads out in a shorter amount of time.
Unfortunately, publishers are equally susceptible to malicious fraud. There are a couple of things in play here, the first being a desire to financially ruin a publisher. Just like one company might maliciously go after a competitor via fraudulent ad clicking, anadpublisher might do the same thing to its competitor.
The other thing to consider is the possibility of framing an otherwise legitimate publisher in order to drive it out of business. Fraudsters will generate tons of fake clicks and make them look like they are coming from the targeted publisher. Once it’s discovered that publisher is punished by Google, Bing, etc. Its revenue falls as a result.
Success Through Destruction
The similar practices of maliciously targeting advertisers and publishers have one thing in common: the desire to succeed through destruction. Rather than competing by offering better products and services, malicious fraudsters prefer to destroy the competition instead.
You could make the case that such thinking is the natural result of promoting the corporate model. Whether you believe in capitalism or not, you must admit that corporatism tends to leverage the advantages of size to destroy the competition rather than honestly competing.
Destroying one’s enemies is now a common business practice. It is not right, but it’s where we are. And unfortunately, click fraud is a destructive tool that can be used against any company that utilizes PPC advertising.
Other Malicious Practices
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Still other malicious activities take place in the click fraud world. For example, you can look at it as a equivalent of vandalism is a real thing. Malicious people who love nothing more than to inflict harm on others engage in click fraud just because they can.
Other malicious motivations include personal retribution, political payback, and vendettas against brands a perpetrator is opposed to. All sorts of malicious click fraud continues unabated because tracking it down and punishing those responsible is not easy.
Perhaps this explains the emergence of software packages like Fraud Blocker. Frustrated advertisers and publishers don’t know what else to do. They feel like they need all the help they can get to identify and stop PPC click fraud. They are not wrong in that respect.
Don’t Forget ‘Friendly’ Click Fraud
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One last form of click fraud, sometimes referred to as ‘friendly’, works in the opposite direction. Rather than fraudulently clicking on links to harm an opponent or enemy, friends of a brand might indiscriminately click on its ads under the false impression that doing so helps the brand.
You might have a person who considers himself a friend of a particular brand, company, organization, or political figure. That person wants to show their support, and clicking ads seems to be an easy way of doing so. What the person doesn’t realize is that click fraud is still a fraud. It still harms the advertiser or publisher in question.
There is no single solution that can detect and prevent click fraud all by itself. Nothing works 100%. So, detection and prevention requires multiple strategies implemented simultaneously. Detection software, website analytics, and KPI tracking all help.
Perhaps click fraud will one day be managed to the point of being negligible in the harm it does. But for now, it is one of the most serious problems in the PPC industry. That needs to change.
