What is Click Fraud? All you Need to Know

Click fraud is the practice of frequently clicking on an advertisement with the intention of increasing revenue for the host website or draining the advertiser’s allocated budget. It is a malicious activity and must be prevented on your ads to get good results from your campaigns.

It takes place with pay-per-click ads and might include either a computer program, a human being, or simply an automated script counterfeiting to be a genuine user and clicking on paid advertisements with no absolute objective of getting their hands on any product or service.

Many a time, click fraud can be carried out and executed by the owners of the sites in order to insincerely escalate its ad revenue. Click fraud can be detected through click fraud detection and can be prevented through an ample variety of means. For instance, through specialized and exclusive monitoring software, any abnormalities or dubious clicking activities can be easily identified.

While click fraud is perpetrated to generate revenue by the pay-per-click advertising system, it is also carried out to diminish the competition amongst the advertisers. To give an instance, let us take two advertisers, namely advertiser 1, and advertiser 2. Now, to reduce competition in the market, advertiser 1 can engage in fraudulent activities such as click fraud to deplete advertiser 2’s advertisement funds and space on trifling clicks. This act leaves advertiser 1 as the sole advertiser. This can be called a non-contracting party click fraud.

Let us take another example: a malicious attacker might attempt to make it appear as if the publisher is clicking on its own advertisements. This act can cause the other party (the advertising company) to cut off ties with the publisher believing that the publisher is being intentionally disloyal and dishonest. Since some publishers’ primal source of income is pay-per-click advertising revenue, this act can kick them out of the business.

Unsurprisingly, many online platforms and websites host ads and are also being paid for hosting the advertisements of the companies who desire to be advertised on their sites. In this procedure, one of the payment lurks is that the website that is hosting the ads will be paid the sum of money depending on the number of visitors on the site who have clicked on the advertisements. Click fraud transpires when an advertisement is clicked in a guileful or deceitful manner with no genuine aim or desire of visiting the actual site or buying the product or service that is being shown/advertised.

One of the significant ways of preventing click fraud on your ads is to opt for a good
click fraud software. Click fraud detection software analyses the clicks in detail and flags them as valid/invalid and restricts the malicious IPs so that they are not shown your ads anymore. With such software, you can run your ad campaigns well.

You don’t have to worry about your allocated ad budget after you opt for a click fraud protection software as none of your money will get spent after invalid clicks. Don’t wait, select a good software and execute your campaigns perfectly without getting any invalid clicks.

Disclaimer: No Asian Age journalist was involved in creating this content. The group also takes no responsibility for this content.