Expert Click Fraud Tips

What is fraud filtering technology?
Search engines are now implementing fraud filtering technology to help prevent and catch click fraud. Overture in particular has taken great strides to improve their fraud filtering technology, and they have dedicated additional resources to handling advertiser fraud cases. Click fraud at overture is taken very seriously, and they have a team of professionals to develop additional technology to prevent pay per click fraud. This fraud filtering technology is also used by other search engines as well, and is still in development. Click-through protection and fraud filtering software is very important to advertisers, and is key in the prevention of click fraud.

What to do if you suspect click fraud.
If you suspect that your company or website is being affected by click fraud, contact the search engine you are advertising with right away. As an internet advertiser the majority of the burden rests on you to identify click fraud, and take the steps to protect yourself. If you have identified fraud ask for a refund on the fraudulent clicks, and in many cases you will be promptly refunded. Take advantage of the tools that search engines like Google and Overture offer to prevent and stop fraud from happening. You also may want to consider investing in software that prevents pay per click fraud.

How to spot pay per click fraud
There are a few things you can do to track and prevent click fraud. If you have good server logs you can track referrals to find fraud. You can also look into fraud detection software. Click fraud at Google, and other large search engines, can be prevented if you know what alert signals to look for. Some indicators of possible pay per click fraud are: Abnormally high search frequency for expensive words, Great spikes in search frequency at a particular time, and repeat clicks from a specific IP address. If you stay alert you can help prevent click fraud What Is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is an illegal practise through which false clicks on PPC advertisments are generated, with the purpose of swerving advertising data, with no possibility whatsoever for a conversion to occur. That is, purely stealing from advertisers who pay for each click.

Fraudulent clicks are also referred to as “invalid”, “malicious” or “artificial”.

Click fraud results in great costs for the advertiser and it is so much more frightening as it is difficult to track down.

Why Does It Occur?
The main trigger-reasons are:

• the intention to obstruct or cause important losses to a competitor's business — when competitors want to run up a bill for an advertiser;
• the intention to make money by forcing the advertising system — when CPC affiliates want to increase per-click commissions on the traffic they generate for the ads. Some web owners even create websites especially for this purpose and then artificially inflate their CTR.
• extortion — when hackers create software that perform fraudulent clicks and use it to threaten various companies in order to obtain money;
• vengeance — when it is done by former or discontent employees.
  

How Is It Done?
Manually generated clicks
A widely spread practise particularly in some regions of Europe, Oceania or South East Asia — but not only here — where surfers are paid to click on paid-ads on their employer’s websites or on his competitors' sites. This system of fraud is almost imposible to identify, if done properly.
Automated methods
Software applications or “hitbots”, designed to click on paid ads. Some of these use clever algorithms to determine click behaviours, reaching the performance level of simulating genuine human visitor behavior. What makes them even harder to detectis their capability of destroying all identifying reference. from impacting your internet marketing campaigns

Exposing click fraud.
The amount of exposure click fraud had received has increased dramatically over the last year. This is largely due to the increase in pay per click search engines, and greater advertiser savvy. Although it is hard to measure the full extent of click fraud, it is said to play a huge role in internet marketing campaigns with industry leaders such as Google and Overture. People are looking into the problem of pay per click fraud as the cost of internet search marketing goes up. Exposing click fraud is not an easy task, and it demonstrates a fundamental weakness in the internet marketing industry.

What is click fraud and how does it happen?
Click fraud is the practice of illegitimately clicking on a text ad in a search engine such as Google, in order to force the advertiser to pay for the click. Some companies who perpetrate this fraudulent activity employ low-cost workers from Asian countries to click on text links and other advertisements. Other companies use internet robots that are programmed to click on links that are listed in search queries and results. Yet another form of pay per click fraud takes place when companies click on their competitors' ads with the intention of depleting their marketing budgets and skewing their search results. All of these forms of fraud can cost online advertisers a lot of money.