What is click fraud? Who is committing it? Why should you be concerned about your paid search campaigns? Learn how to identify if you are at risk with this special report from Click Forensics.
TClickForensicsQ4 Special Report - Click Fraud:Accurate Independent Analysis The Growing Threat to R.O.I.
Understanding The Impact of Click Fraud 7 Ways to Stop & Prevent Click Fraud
Executive Summary:The problem of click fraud is getting increasingly worse and is threatening the return on investment of online pay per click advertising. According to the Click Fraud Index, 16.2% of clicks (that you pay for) are fraudulent and that number has been growing quarter over quarter. As a result, it has become necessary for third-party auditors and experts to help advertisers address the problem and ensure high click quality to convert clicks to customers.
Understanding The Impact of Click Fraud:Click fraud is an increasing problem that can seriously reduce the value of pay per click advertising campaigns. This special report covers high-level information including:. What is click fraud? 72.4%. Who is committing click fraud & why? of all sites in the Yahoo Publisher Network and Google AdSense are . Why is click fraud getting worse, not better? parked domains or Made for Ad sites. What does click fraud mean for advertisers?. What are the search providers doing? 28.1%the amount of click fraud on the . 7 ways to stop and prevent click fraud search and content networks
What is click fraud?Click fraud is the practice of clicking on a pay per click ad without any intention of buying the advertiser's product or other desired action. Advertisers are the victims because they pay for clicks that don't convert.
Who is committing click fraud & why?People or groups now termed "fraudsters" that are trying to 1) generate revenue and profit for themselves or 2) hurt a competitor by depleting their ad budget and improving their own ad position. Some click fraud is perpetrated by individual fraudsters and is minor in nature and some that is more complex is performed by organized crime.
Click fraud is part of a larger category of "Invalid Clicks". Invalid clicks are all the clicks that advertisers should not be paying for. They include non-malicious clicks that are also contributing to low quality clicks that eat up advertiser budgets quickly. Invalid clicks include clicks from spiders that crawl the web and click on every link to index sites, human or bot clicks used in testing of ad campaigns, clicks coming from outside geo-targeted regions and many other types of unwanted clicks. This brief focuses on click fraud but you should be aware that there are many other types of unwanted invalid clicks that can deplete your ad budget and we'll be focusing on those in a subsequent paper.
What types of Click Fraud exist?There are two primary types of click fraud: 1. Publisher Click Fraud: Publishers who join the search and content networks get ads placed on their sites. Every time someone clicks on an ad on their site, they share in the revenue the advertiser pays for the click. If a publisher owns many sites with many ads and generates lots of traffic to those sites, the revenue they receive from the advertisers can be substantial.2. Competitor Click Fraud: When you bid on a keyword, you specify how much you are willing to pay per click and how much you are willing to pay per day - your ad budget. Competitors are motivated to click on the ads listed in more prominent positions to deplete their ad budgets, improve their own ad position and put a little hurt on their competitors - all at the same time.
Page 1 of 3TClickForensicsQ4 Special Report - Click Fraud:Accurate Independent Analysis The Growing Threat to R.O.I.
Why Is Click Fraud Getting Worse, Not Better?Every type of online threat has shown the same trajectory - start simple but if there is a way to make money from it, then complexity seems to know no bounds. Viruses, worms, spam, and phishing all evolved and eventually became so sophisticated that people could not stop them by themselves - they needed to enlist the help of products specifically designed to stop the threats. 52%Click Fraud is showing the same history. New technologies and techniques are being the average reduction in click fraud for Click used by organized crime to rake in the money available from unsuspecting advertisers. Forensics customersThe two primary techniques used are Clickbots and Clickfarms.
Clickbots are bots (robot programs) that are programmed to click on ads. Many of the viruses that spread across the Internet deposit clickb... [download for more]
