Click Fraud and Search Engine Marketing Published by PPC-List.comWhether it be an overanxious affiliate of a pay per click search engine, or
search engine itself, if you have participated in search engine marketing you have most likely found yourself to be victim of click fraud, whether you know it or not. Click fraud is tainting image of many pay per click search engines and costing advertisers far too much money. Although negative effects of click fraud are obvious to both advertisers and pay per click search engines, many engines do not take necessary steps to curb click fraud. The result is that you are losing money
Types of Click Fraud
Forced Traffic and Robot Traffic
The most egregious form of click fraud comes from forced traffic. Utilizing pop-ups, start page exchanges, and other mass traffic generation tools, person committing fraud forces traffic through paid listings. For example, if person committing click fraud were to use pop-ups, rather than have a pop-up display content of an ad, pop-up is used deliver a visitor to click URL that engine uses to track traffic. The search engine does not know that click was not user generated, but rather generated by a pop-up. As a result search engine deducts money from advertiser’s account and considers pop-up to actually be a click. The affiliate then gets paid for delivering nothing more than a pop-up. Many PPC’s have attempted to reduce ability of affiliates to force traffic to their listings. Using unique session logging and requiring a valid HTTP referrer are a couple of ways click fraud is being reduced by some pay per click search engines. Even with these methods in place, some people have still discovered ways to force traffic to paid listings. The best defense a PPC has against forced traffic is to perform routine audits on their network and their affiliates.
Robot traffic is a form of forced traffic, however, instead of having click URL load fully in a user’s browser click URL is merely called by an automated program. Search engines that do not guard against this type of traffic will once again consider this to be a legitimate click. The danger with robot traffic is that it can be generated innocently by search engines crawling web. Fortunately most search engines distinguish between spidered traffic and real traffic.
Excessive International Traffic
Although Internet transcends most international borders, excessive traffic from Asia often signal generally poor quality traffic from your search engine. This traffic is particularly dangerous to your advertising campaigns as most advertisers do not know how to distinguish traffic origins by country. More dangerous yet is fact that many search engines do nothing to filter out excessive international traffic. International traffic is considered valid traffic by these engines as it is user originated traffic.
International traffic is not what most advertisers are hoping to spend their money on when starting a pay per click search engine campaign. The target market of most advertisers includes U.S., Canada, Great Britain, other European countries, and possibly Australia. In addition to traffic not being truly focused, this excessive international traffic also has a greater chance of being generated through incentivized or fraudulent means.
Sport and Competitor Clicking
In highly competitive pay per click scenarios advertisers may turn to dishonest means to hurt their competition. Such is case with competitor clicking. Competitor clicking is act of clicking on listings for sake of costing another advertiser money. In an extreme case of competitor clicking, one company may click a listing several times in a row with hope of depleting their competition’s funds.
Sport clicking works in a similar fashion, however, instead of a competitor clicking on a listing a non-interested party clicks on expensive keywords. When a person comes across an expensive pay per click listing, many times they become interested in who would pay for such a listing. Other people just simply click on listings because they know it costs advertiser money. Regardless of their motivation, advertisers have unfortunately become familiar with visitors from pay per click search engines that do not have any real interest in their service.
Although it is not possible for a search engine to completely eliminate competitor and sport clicking as it is impossible to know initially difference between an interested visitor and a visitor with ill-intent, it is possible for search engines to guard against excessive clicking. Frequency caps are most effective means to guard against this form of click fraud. A frequency cap will limit number of times an advertiser is charged for a visitor within a set amount of time. For example, if a listing is clicked by an individual, advertiser will be charged. If that same individual clicks on same listing again within a short amount of time, advertiser will not be charged for second click. Avoid Companies Who Don’t Avoid Click Fraud
It is a simple rule, but a rule that is not followed very closely by most marketers. If search engines you are advertising with are not careful to avoid those who are prone to committing click fraud, chances are good that advertising with them will result in losing money to click fraud. Search engines that are actively pursuing click fraud tend to have stringent requirements to become a distribution partner. Other search engines that actively pursue click fraud set themselves up to not encourage click fraud, possibly by not using partner networks or possibly by not paying their partners on a per click basis.
