Web Traffic Fraud.com

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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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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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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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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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.

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© 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.

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© 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.

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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.

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There are several companies who are working on developing products that can easily identify web traffic fraud or Click Fraud. Some of these solutions essentially need the co-operation of the advertising networks, and so these firms are trying to develop a good rapport with these networks but are met with resistance for obvious reasons. Broadly solutions are available that tackle web traffic fraud. They can be classified into two groups:

1. Forensic Analysis: These rely on an analysis of the log files in the web server of the advertiser. This will give a detailed idea about factors such as where the traffic originated from and what was the subsequent behavior of the traffic after reaching the landing pages. Since these tools use the normal industry wide log files, advertising network companies such as Google can independently verify the data that comes up from this analysis. The flip side of this method is that the people who actually do the forensic analysis should be reliable and have a high degree of professional ethics and honesty.

But realize that short of a court order you will never see a Google traffic log file. So the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the advertisers with no real leverage to enforce the findings of fraud.

2. Third party Tools: There are web-based solutions that can be used to tag the ads. This involves the use of a JavaScript or a tiny single pixel image on the landing page of the advertiser. Cookies can be used to collect information about the visitor into a third party storage location and while doing an analysis of web traffic fraud this can be downloaded and analyzed. These products range from simple raw data of traffic to be further analyzed to higher end scrapers and filters, which highlight clicks that seem to not originate from a genuine buyer. It is very easy to add false information to the log files (user agents, IP addresses etc.) of the advertiser’s web server and therefore a third party storage of data (third party fraud auditing service) is more reliable and acceptable to an advertising network. However caveat is that if the fraud originates from or is directed against a publisher then these solutions may not be easily able to trace the pattern as they are focused on a single advertiser alone and see only a small part of the entire traffic volume.

Thus these solutions reach conclusions based on a snapshot of data thereby increasing the possibility of a wrong diagnosis and false positives.

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As pay per click prices steadily increase so will click fraud scams surrounding it. Web Traffic fraud or click fraud happens mostly in PPC advertising where a person or a computer program (bot) repeatedly clicks on an ad, without the intention of visiting the target link. The aim of web traffic fraud is to generate a pay per click revenue that does not give the advertiser an opportunity to earn a sale.

Any person who promotes a PPC ad can indulge in this behavior to artificially boost his revenue split. However since that is punishable by law in many jurisdictions often third parties are used to boost the clicks.
For example, if a blogger runs a PPC campaign such as Google adwords in his site, he may ask his friends and family to click on the ads so that he can earn more revenue. This may be done with a good intention, however if the blogger is accused of a web traffic fraud, then the plan might actually be counter-productive and cause his affiliate account to be suspended and all funds earned withheld until final reconciliation with advertisers.

There are also fraudsters who commit web traffic fraud (click fraud) with a malicious intent. These can include competitors of the companies who own the websites running PPC ads. If they are both operating in a highly competitive market, then the competitor may want to deplete the advertiser’s online campaign budget by making him pay an exorbitant amounts of money for traffic that does not generate any revenue.

Another type of rampant fraud found on PPC engines are competitors of people who host PPC ads on their sites (i.e. adwords content network) . When a competitor clicks on these ads, it may seem as if the publisher/webmaster is doing this to artificially boost is revenue. This may lead to a cancellation of the contract with that publisher/webmasters site. If an online content publisher uses PPC ad revenue as his main income stream then this kind of attack could be devastating and put the site out of business.

Then there are competitors that simply click other advertisers ads depleting their advertising budget in a effort to make them drop the ad from the rankings so that their ad will dominate. These people do not look for the financial reward but rather the satisfaction that comes from having attacked an ‘enemy’. These attacks are the worst to fight against since its very difficult to detect methodical clicks slowly say after day. You must always be careful about these fraudsters, whether you are a publisher or an advertiser. There are many ways to catch them. Bookmark this site to find out in future articles regarding click fraud.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com