Understanding What Click Fraud Is In Contextual Marketing

Pay Per Click or the abbreviated version "PPC" is a mode of Internet advertising that is utilized on web sites (like blogs for example) as well as search engines and ad networks. Promoters post ad content with a number of such web hosts and the host is remunerated only if and when their ad is clicked. The words "pay per click" literally means what it declares: the Vendor pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad.

Google, Yahoo! and all the added PPC companies substantial and small are at the moment sucking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable assessment of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the Pay Per Click marketing arena has not unsurprisingly attracted armies of scam artists whose tricks have the capability to honestly erode consumer confidence.

Click fraud happens when a person, automated script, or computer software application imitates a legal consumer of a internet browser clicking on an ad for the objective of generating a charge per click without having real interest in the target product or service of the ad's link. Despite the fact that it is hard to watch and keep under control, a number of search engines have developed automated systems that endeavor to protect against these practices with varying degrees of effectiveness, but still the most highly developed of them are not infallible.

Further confusing the circumstances is the statement that the advertisers themselves profit financially from such fraud. The leading networks fulfill two roles, as PPC providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can give rise to conflicts of interest. For example, whereas a Pay Per Click provider will lose money to click fraud when it makes payment to a publisher, it more than makes up for it when it collects money from an advertiser, so indirectly, the Pay Per Click provider profits from click fraud.

Click fraud can be something as straightforward as starting a trivial Web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to generate revenue. Frequently the amount of clicks and their value is so tiny that the fraud goes undetected. Larger-sized frauds involve running scripts which simulate a human clicking on advertisements in web pages on a extensive scale.

Another cause of click fraud is what are known as non-contracting parties, these parties are not part of any pay-per-click agreement.

Some instances of non-contracting parties are:

Advertising competitors - By deliberately clicking on their competitors ads (in so doing forcing them to shell out for worthless clicks) they can weaken them or worse yet put them out of business, even if they aren't profiting directly from this type of click fraud.

Publishing Competitors - Publishers may try to frame their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own Pay Per Click Ads, with their end game being that the advertising network closes their account.

Malice - Like the types of individuals who intentionally exploit and then email computer viruses, some will take part in click fraud not for monetary gain simply to make a publisher and/or advertiser look bad for which ever reason.

Friendship - Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers learn that their friend's business profits when their ads are clicked on, they may decide to do so themselves, thinking that they are helping out. If they overdo it however, they can do more harm than good when the publisher is accused of being involved with click fraud and has their account closed.

While advertising networks make every effort to end fraud by all such parties it's often challenging to know which clicks are legitimate. More often than not the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.

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