Web Traffic Fraud.com

Ok let’s think about this for a second! If you’re not into SEO or a Spammer then you are pretty much at the mercy of major search engine PPC’s and other Ad Networks to provide web traffic to your sites.

And here is how it works.

1. We pull out our credit card and pay ‘upfront’ for web traffic that we cannot see, touch or confirm. Basically our money is being held by the Seller/Traffic Provider to spend once traffic is delivered. Millions if not billions of dollars are being uploaded to advertisers accounts and we are to ‘trust’ that the PPC search engine or Ad Network is spending our money ‘honestly’!?

This is the most ridiculous assumption that we all grudgingly accept daily.

Why is it this way?

Because those who were first in line that have acquired the most traffic made up all the rules and terms! Which are extremely one-sided and in favor of the traffic providers.

We fully understand that 10 years ago technology moved fast on the net and business models were created on the fly to accommodate demand. But 10 years later these same unfair business models and practices are reaping billions without considering the best interests of advertisers.

“In the real world no one pays ‘full’ upfront fees for services and/or products rendered for very good reasons. Any wise business person will use an escrow. And no seasoned business person would allow sellers to solely determine and deduct revenues earned from seller-controlled deposits without the buyer/advertiser being able to reconcile, confirm delivery and quality of those products or services stringently.”

It seems most get caught up in the fear of loss, hope of gain mentality and lose the sense of basic business principals.

It gets worse. How could the buyer/advertiser even reconcile numbers since they never see an IP address of a visitor (that they paid for) ‘recorded by the seller’?

I mean we really don’t have a choice who tracks the visitor’s do we? Why can’t the advertiser/buyer track and determine all the visitors and the sellers deduct our money from our deposits based on the advertisers tracking numbers? Aren’t we just as capable and honest as the Sellers? Ridiculous huh and why there is a need for a third-party click fraud auditing and tracking system that represents the best interests of both parties.

This is a ‘Major Conflict of Interest’ in the real brick and mortar world that has gone seemingly undisputed on the net for over 10 years.

Again the same company who is holding our money is also counting the clicks/impressions and deducting money from our upfront deposits without any means of reconciliation?

They determine a real or fraudulent visitor and are supposedly representing our best interests when they are a for-profit business!?

And to add more insult to the injury major PPC search engine/Ad Networks tracking systems only record visitor counts and how much money we owe them.

Here is an example of a major online search engine that is making a fortune from PPC Ads.

20 clicks /1000 impressions -$20.00 That’s it!?

There is a ton of information on how to find keywords, optimization and creating accounts (blah blah) but when it comes to how much we owe them we get the least amount of information possible.

And lets not forget that major PPC’s search engines do not provide any record of IP’s whatsoever. How can you the advertiser possibly determine if a visitor is legitimate if you cannot track and confirm ‘Seller Recorded’ IP’s? Heck lets just take their word for it. If they say it’s real and legit then they must be right? Wrong.

If they want to track all the clicks AND track revenues owed -at the very least provide the ‘paying’ advertiser with IP’s addresses.

There are 1000’s of ways to spam and to commit online fraud…

If you are an online advertiser trying to engage the services of a third party web traffic fraud detection and auditing firm, then you need to be aware of certain things to look for in a comprehensive click fraud detection solution. Click Fraud is very difficult to detect especially without years of in-depth knowledge on the many ways click fraudster use to deceive even the most trained and sophisticated eye.

There are literally 1000’s, if not hundreds of 1000’s of click fraudsters making a decent living committing fraud daily. Lets face it, unlike email spamming who is policing click fraud? Who is getting caught and serving jail time for these activities? It’s still basically the wild wild west out there in cyberspace when it comes to click fraud. Its time to take matters into your own hands armed with the best solutions available.

Some third party click fraud monitoring and auditing service not only just provide click audit data, but also meaningful compressive reports that you can confirm with your own logs to support suspected invalid/fraudulent clicks. A good solution should be very user friendly and should offer features such as the ability to blacklist offending sites. If the solution allows you to build a blacklist then it can be easily exported to the PPC sites such as Google to immediately reduce the impact of click fraud.

There are many solutions from complicated back-end filters to on landing page tracking scripts. There is a thin line of difference between a low value click and click fraud and automated solutions may not always be able to identify the difference. Many automated solutions can produce false-positives where one could end up “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” per say. One way in which a third party click fraud auditing service can overcome this problem is by rating the level of click fraud based on past IP patterns and IP origination and user behavior -which some refer to as post analysis. In the same way you can implement you own post analytical regime from past log reports to build your own blacklists, whitelists etc,.

Another important factor to keep in mind, while selecting click fraud detection software is to check whether they offer a free trial. A free trial would let you experiment with the software and then make you can make a decision on whether it is the right service for you.

During your free trial, check out all its features and think of whether you need all of them (if not, you can think of a less sophisticated solution) or whether certain essential features are missing (in this case, you need to look for a different software with better features). Keep in mind though most click auditing solutions are simple trackers for ads and not standalone click fraud detectors. More times than not, click fraud detection is an add-on module, an after thought and may not serve your needs as a suitable click fraud solution.

Some solution providers maintain a master database of websites, which are notorious for click frauds. These solutions have their own crawlers similar to that of search engine crawlers and they try to keep this database up to date by verifying websites based on currently known web traffic fraud patterns.

Click fraud can cause a huge negative impact on the online advertisement campaign effecting large corporation, not to mention small businesses. If you are an advertiser who relies on pay per click advertisements to drive web traffic to your website, then you need to get up to speed and learn about the many ingenious ways click fraud occurs. You should also be aware of what preventive actions you can take to minimize the impact of an attack, if it occurs and how you can identify the early warning signs of a possible click fraud attack against your PPC ad campaign.

In addition, it is important that advertisers know about what services are offered by third party click fraud auditing companies and whether it is necessary to engage their services to audit your web server logs. Some Knowledge of click fraud would help advertisers make sure that they do not pay for clicks that were not done with the intention of visiting the website and making a purchase. In fact, advertisers can even demand a refund from search engines such as Google and Yahoo provided they are armed with the right set of detailed statistics as evidence that click fraud has already occurred.

Search engines such as Google and yahoo have the official stand that they are doing all they can to detect click fraud and that they do not ask advertisers to pay for clicks that appear to be ‘invalid’ or ‘fraudulent’ even though they don’t like to use that word. They maintain that they have adequate detection and prevention mechanisms in place to fight web traffic fraud. However, that is not always the case, as click fraud perpetrators are becoming smarter and more sophisticated each day and can avoid being detected.

Thus the onus is on advertisers to keep their eyes open and heads up for any signs of click fraud and immediately take corrective and proactive action. If you are in a a category where your keywords have heavy competition, then maybe it is even a good idea to completely avoid pay per click advertisements altogether and instead look at other options of online advertisements in order to drive web traffic that is more likely to lead to conversions and revenue?

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

You would be fooling yourselves, if you believe that your ad is immune to web traffic click fraud. If you have been lucky enough not to have been a victim yet, you can be almost be sure that sooner or later you will get hit by fraudulent clicks that range from invalid to incentivized clicks. Though you cannot completely overcome click frauds, you can reduce the impact of web traffic fraud within your online advertising campaigns. In this article we will look at some of the things that can be done to decrease your exposure to click fraud.

Disable Content Syndication: One of the easiest and most effective manner in which you can minimize the vulnerability to web traffic fraud is to disable your ads within the content syndication network. All search engine advertisers such as Google and Yahoo have this feature and you should disable it.

On the other hand we believe that the content networks can generate good traffic volume that does convert well but if you are a novice to these types of networks it’s like playing Russian roulette with your ad budget. On the other hand, some websites receive a lot of prospective customers from ads in the content network and by disabling this; you are potentially filtering out these legit customers as well. So you can be aggressive in stopping “click-farming” but at the same time are you “throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

PPC Audits: Today there are several third parties who offer click fraud detection and click fraud auditing services. The advantage of engaging their services is that they would be able to log statistical evidence needed to prove click fraud from your web server logs by micro analysis. Once you get their reports, you can then submit it to the search companies and request for a refund for clicks that were not genuine. Keep in mind that this is a tedious process and most search engines are reluctant to give cash refunds. Instead they would at best grant you additional ad exposure as a refund. Also remember that in this case the search engine appears to be the final decision maker (judge and jury) and they can simply refuse to accept your claims by sticking to their guns and claiming that they were genuine clicks. Your only recourse at this point is a lawsuit and what small online business has the budget for a tedious expensive lawsuit?

Site Blocking: This is the last option that you as a business owner may have. This enables you to blacklist certain sites so that your ad does not appear to them. This is a very useful way to not just reduce web traffic frauds, but also to minimize the low value clicks.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

If you are an owner of a home business or a bigger e-commerce website who relies heavily on PPC advertising to direct prospective customers to your website, then you need to be aware of what is known as web traffic fraud or click fraud. In simple terms, these are clicks which originate from a source who is not interested in the products or services that you have to offer.

Since web traffic fraud can cause you huge monetary losses, you need to know about how you can detect the early signs of fraudulent web traffic that might be getting redirected towards your ads. Noticing these signs will help you take quick action in reducing impacts towards your ad spend, thereby minimizing your losses. You should periodically scan the standard reports provided by Google to look for these signs that can point towards a possible web traffic fraud.

1. Sudden increase in clicks without a corresponding rise in conversions: If you notice that the click rates have suddenly shot up without a similar increase in conversions, then it almost always points to a web traffic fraud. You can easily see this by looking at the ‘cost per conversion’ metric given by Google and Yahoo. If you notice this value suddenly doubling then you know that something is going wrong.

But remember that PPC’s want you to keep your eye on conversions ‘only’ because it takes your focus off of rising CPC’s you are being overcharged.

2. Sudden spike in ad impressions on content networks: If the number of ad impressions within the content network is rising then it is a sure sign of click fraud. This occurs due to your ad being triggered by keywords from a site that indulges in click farming. You will be especially subjected to this, if your keyword is highly competitive. Try to stay away from highly competitive keywords. There are many 3 word phrases that are extremely targeted for pennies on the dollar -not dollars.

3. Quickly Running Out of Budget: If you have set an upper limit for your daily budget and you suddenly notice that it is getting depleted faster than usual then it could be because of click fraud. This happens more so, when you have enabled ‘content network’ (Google’s approved third party websites). Chances are by the time you discover you max budget is being depleted then traffic fraud may have been ramping up slowing for many weeks. Go back a month and check your logs to the present to spot any irregular click behavior.
Remember that these are just pointers that warn you that there might be a possible fraudulent web traffic clicks being committed against your ads.

One way to ‘supplement’ your efforts in monitoring third party traffic for fraud is to engage the services of a third party for detailed auditing of your web server logs. Some of these agencies are experienced in monitoring and detection fraud. Bottom line is that it will be your word against the search engines when disputing traffic fraud. It will serve you well to have a “neutral” third party providing logs to support your claims.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

If you are trying to understand more about web click fraud, you need to know the difference between a ‘low-value’ click vs. clicks that are truly fraudulent. A ‘low-value’ click can be a set of repeated clicks received from sites that are irrelevant to the keyword being advertised. These sites would generate a lot of clicks, but the conversion rates would be abnormally low. Major types of sites that generate these ‘low value’ clicks are domain parking sites as well as community oriented sites or social media sites.

Community sites are those which pay users to visit the site and post some information. All of these sites participate in PPC programs and some of them even openly admit that they pay users to browse and click on ads (click farm or incentive clicks). But you as an advertiser should be weary of these sites as none of these ‘paid clicks’ would lead to actual business for your products or services.

A quick search on the internet for keyword, “work from home” will present a plethora of work at home opportunities where stay at home moms can earn a monthly mortgage payment clicking on ads for a small revenue share. Think about it, an army of 1000 stay at home mom’s clicking on text link ads all day while watching soup opera’s. I force not to be reckoned with!

Domain Parking is yet another problem related to web traffic fraud. Recently Google has permitted domain registrars to place ads on home pages of registered but ‘parked’ sites. This has started generating huge revenue for the domain registrars at your expense. People who own domain names earlier did not get any revenue from those sites. However now that this has become common practice, some people are actually hoarding domain names for this purpose alone. Some of these people who literally own quite a lot of domain names make millions of dollars in ad revenue alone. Traffic from misspelled domain names (users mistyping letters) is a industry within itself.

Research has also shown that another place where low value clicks originate from is social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.com. These sites promote quite a lot of genuine advertisers and therefore it makes it even more difficult to identify the web traffic frauds that originate from these sites. However, certain businesses definitely are not conducive to advertising on social media. One example is business to business products or services. Again studies have shown that most clicks originating from these sites were made with the intention to generate revenue and not for making a purchase.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

Web traffic fraud or click fraud as they are commonly known occurs in several different ways. In this article, we will look at two ways in which click fraud is most commonly perpetuated. Here they are:

1. Budget Attacks: Search engines often offer an option for advertisers to cap their ad spends by setting a daily budget or highest dollar limit for the various pay per click ad campaigns that they may be running. After the daily budget is reached, the ad is removed from the search engine pages and thus won’t be available for potential customers. This is a very useful feature for advertisers as they can now control what they spend for advertising. However it also enables a competitor to click multiple times on the ad till the upper limit is reached. If competitors click daily on your ads, at different time intervals, this type of activity is almost virtually undetectable.

It is a very common form of attack, but there is no data about how large the problem is. The chances of a budget attack is less because of two factors:

a.) Most fraudsters who are your competitors are novices at click fraud and do not cover their tracks very well so it is easily detectable and hence only someone who really wants to destroy you enough to risk being caught would engage in it.

b.) It does not bring direct revenue to the competitor, except that he can get the indirect benefit of driving you out of business.

2. Click Farming Attacks: These are more prevalent than budget attacks as there is a huge potential of earnings for third party click fraudsters and it is also easier to conduct since all you need is a click farming website. Even if you do not have a strong competitor trying hard to put you out of business, you can be subject to this kind of web traffic fraud. This occurs when websites which run the ad try to generate maximum revenue by clicking on the ads in their website. They can even engage third parties to do this (incentive click traffic). This is really hazardous for the advertiser as he loses money for the clicks received on his ads without this translating into additional sales and revenue.

Click fraud is quite common in today’s online world and if you are a small business owner, then you need to be aware of it in spite of what the big search engines say -trying to minimize web traffic click fraud. Be aggressive and proactive in protecting your ad campaigns from being attacked by those who make small fortunes due to their click fraud efforts.

Bookmark this site. Or please leave a comment or question. We will be happy to respond.

© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

Click fraud or invalid clicks as some like to call it in a effort to minimize its definition, is an area of contention between pay per click search engines and advertisers ever since PPC ads have become a popular means of advertising for small business owners and an equally popular means of earning revenue for website owners and bloggers. While search engines like Google claim that they have their own internal mechanisms to detect Click Fraud and that they do not charge advertisers for clicks that are not genuine, critics of PPC advertising point out that Click Frauds are being done in increasingly innovative ways that are too difficult to detect by software programs.

For example, one of the newest ways in which Click Fraud happen is to use spyware to capture user behavior in a website. These programs would then automate the click on the Google adwords. The advertiser would assume that it was the effective ad that brought him traffic while in reality he would have got the traffic even otherwise. And because it originates from the same IP that ultimately visited the site, Google and other search engines would definitely charge the advertiser for the click. Thus all traffic to the site, whether it originated naturally or through PPC ads, will get accounted for as PPC ad effectiveness. This may even have a spiraling effect as the advertiser may spend more and more dollars on PPC ads, making him increasingly vulnerable to frauds.

In a way the fight between search engines and people perpetuating Click Frauds is like the fight between software viruses and virus protection firms. Each group keeps devising new strategies and the war goes on. Meanwhile, you as a small business owner need to keep your eyes open to identify any signs of Click Fraud in your website and quickly try to make amends. Read up on click frauds, how they happen and learn about all that you can do to protect your site. After all you are paying your hard earned dollars for internet advertising and you deserve to get protection against frauds and should be paying only for genuine clicks that have good conversion rates.

Bookmark this site. You probably have many questions and concerns. We cannot possibly answer all of them in one article. Or please leave a comment or question. We will be happy to respond.

© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

As a small business owner, you have used PPC advertising or maybe planning to use PPC advertising. If so, you need to be aware of a type of fraud that is prevalent in PPC advertising known as Web Site Traffic Click Fraud or the term Google uses, “invalid” click. In simple terms, it involves artificially boosting the number of clicks on the ads using either human beings or pre-written programs known as bots. As a small business owner, this will impact your business budget as well as advertising plans. Given below, is a list of things that can negatively affect your ROI (return on investment)

Tracking of advertising returns: When you calculate the revenue per click that is generated you will make mistakes, as you are now taking into account invalid clicks too. This may make you feel that your PPC advertising is not worth the money spent on it and you might abandon the campaign prematurely.

Financial loss: Pay per click advertising requires you to pay the search engine for each click on your ad. If people or programs who have no interest in your offers click on your ads then you end up paying the search engines money without any hope of financial gain. With the increasing number of online businesses competing with each other, keyword CPC (cost per click) have been steadily increased over the years. Many feel CPC is becoming out of reach for many small business owners.

But you need not worry too much as there are things you can do to protect yourselves from click fraud. First is to watch out for any sudden unusual activity in your web traffic without a corresponding increase in sales. This is a clear indicator of Web Click Fraud is happening and you need to immediately alert your search engine about this.

You can also engage the services of a third party fraud detection monitoring firm to analyze your web server logs and identify the clicks that did not originate from a genuinely interested party. You can then submit these results to your search engine and ask for a refund. But remember that the upper hand lies with the search engine and you may need to really fight it out before your claims are accepted.

Bookmark this site. You probably have many questions and concerns. We cannot possibly answer all of them in one article. Or please leave a comment or question. We will be happy to respond.

© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

If you are a small business owner who has decided on relying on PPC advertising as a part of your online marketing campaign, then you need to know how to protect yourselves against web traffic fraud. This is especially important in areas such as electronic cyberspace where the competition in the online market place is too fierce to ignore.

Web traffic fraud can cause a devastating financial impact on your business operations. And like any other catastrophes it is better to prevent click fraud or at least identify it as soon as it occurs and even take corrective actions before it occurs.

As we know search engines like Google which run popular PPC networks such as Adwords are aware of the growing menace of web traffic fraud that cost its customers millions of dollars each year. There are several inbuilt mechanisms in these programs which handle stuff like automated script based click generators. And the search engines try their best not to invoice these clicks to the advertiser. However some kinds of fraud escape even their watchful eyes and filters and therefore as an advertiser you need to do what it takes to protect yourselves against undetectable click fraud, rather than trusting the search engine to handle.
After all its your hard earned dollars that are at jeopardy.

DIY: Doing it yourselves entails that you have the technical prowess to identify click fraudsters. However, it could be really difficult to go through thousands of IP addresses, domain names etc. and log files, especially after heavy web traffic spikes that an attack can cause.
Outsource It: There are several vendors who offer great tools to prevent web traffic frauds. It would be a great idea to purchase these tools or hire an expert outsider to do the fraud prevention on your behalf.

There are certain things that you should keep in mind while selecting your vendor for fraud prevention. The first and foremost is that the service is reliable and reputable. Ask for frequent tracking reports so that you know what they are doing. Also get a vendor who has got positive feedback about their solution’s effectiveness. And keep in mind many third party ad tracking service providers skimp on fraud detecting in their system. Usually it’s a addon to ad tracking not a proactive fraud detection system.

Once you identify that a fraud has occurred, immediately notify your advertising network provider. Possibly you will be reimbursed in time – but make sure you have stringent no nonsense log data to back up your suspected fraudulent clicks, otherwise that money will be gone forever.

Bookmark this site. You probably have many questions and concerns. We cannot possibly answer all of them in one article. Or please leave a comment or question. We will be happy to respond.

© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com