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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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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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

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.

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