Thursday 23 February 2012

Click Fraud

By Rui Ludovino


Users of AdWords or AdSense would definitely know what "click fraud" is all about. But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished? Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone with an AdSense banner on their website) every time a person clicks on the ad. So click fraud is something that people do in order to make extra money.

There are many people setting up websites just to manipulate this to make money for their own. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods. Some are complex methods, some are sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple. One of the most complexes is through the use of so called "hitbots". These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners. Google's AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and anyone can find a loophole just by doing a search on Google.

Another method is to hire a lot of people in poorer countries to click the links on your site. So, they will sit in front of a computer each day and just click away to make you a lot of money. Because they come from very poor countries like India, they are willing to do the job for just $0.50 an hour. However, there is a problem with this method because once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued. So, they use large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking in order to avoid being detected by Google. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). It is difficult to track these clicks because they will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

This phenomenon is not something that we should ignore. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain. In fact there's so much that if search engine companies don't increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behaviour could become more become even more damaging. Google has a very strict policy to handle click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. However, efforts are still being put in to solve this rising danger.

It is said that more than 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person who is paying for the ad. Some calculations shows that the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large. There is a rise in activities like groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other's links (which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they click such links.

While this problem remains a threat, AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes. There are some means of protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them.




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