What does Click Fraud mean?
Artificial traffic generation on a website with the help of bots, auto clickers, and fake clicks is known as Click Fraud. Click fraud protection is crucial to promote genuine hard work on the top list of search engines. Click fraud exploits the method of pay-per-click online advertising. The advertisements shown on a certain website generate ad revenue, and website traffic is generated to make huge benefits from the ad revenue.
How does Click Fraud work?
Click fraud manipulates the organic search results based on original data provided on the website. Bots, auto clickers, and low-cost labourers are usually assigned the task of increasing the click-through rate. They are generally assigned to promote a specific website or content by increasing click-through rates. When low-cost paid labourers or bots fraudulently click on ads, it means you’re paying for clicks that are being artificially generated. Click fraud can use up the daily ad spend of your company, and you would not reach the audience to be targeted with your special message.
How to identify a Click fraud?
If you are experiencing click fraud, you will notice a considerable volume of clicks coming from a system. This traffic generation also appears suspicious and harmful to advertising networks. But the concerned people can easily get rid of this by routing the traffic and the bot with different Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that continually change using a virtual private network (VPN). Unethical people can involve in the fraud through many sources from different locations so that to avoid the detection. Rather than focusing on placing the ad on legitimate websites, the fraudsters can use the new website specifically for click fraud purposes. Any website in this category will never have a real customer base. Also, there will be no real content available for users.
Who can Cause Click Fraud?
Click fraud can be created by your competitors and publishing houses to make huge profits. Click fraud is mainly caused by the one who can harm your company and earn profit. And it can also be manipulated by other business workers like publishing houses who get the share from your advertisements.
By interpreting the traffic generated, publishing houses that get a share of the ad revenue can increase their profit. And competitors can make a profit by showing you fake profit for a short duration. You will not make a reasonable profit in return by investing a considerable amount of money. That is why Click Fraud protection is critical.
How to prevent click fraud?
It is very complicated to spot as there is no proper method to detect click fraud. People may be out there clicking your ads and using up your ad budget. If you’re the target of click fraud, then there won’t be any return on your investment in the long term. So, click fraud prevention is essential to avoid the benefit of your competitors.
Set up IP exclusions on ads to prevent click fraud. You will have to think about displaying your ads.
You can install click fraud prevention software.
If you think click fraud is hurting you financially, investing in fraud prevention software is a wise idea. Click fraud is generally detected by the following tools-
IP addresses – In click fraud cases, you will notice many clicks from a single system in a short duration or regular interval.
Click time stamps – By noticing nick time stamps, you can detect that either bot is creating traffic on your website or its organic traffic.
Action time stamps – By calculating time stamps, you can also differentiate between organic traffic and click fraud, as fraudsters do not spend much time on the website; it could be a few minutes to a few seconds.
