Difference between Low Value Clicks and Fraudulent Clicks

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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