Pay Per Click: How to prevent Click Fraud

Dec 8th 08 Posted by vinson in Affiliates

Pay per click (PPC) advertising continues to gain popularity in the online marketing world as an effective and inexpensive way to drive targeted visitors to web sites. PPC will pay their members only when someone clicks through your banner ad or link But PPC has a major problem about fraud clicks which most of the members is facing right now.

Click fraud is when someone or something generates illegitimate hits on your banner or text advertisement causing you to pay for worthless clicks. Example of this is when a visitor of your site clicked your paid ads more than once which is against the program TOS. Also forcing your visitors to click your ads is illegal like “Click my link ads to help my site” is also a violation. Other companies pay their own employees to click on competitor ads. And lastly click fraud can be generated by online robots programmed to click on advertiser or affiliate ads. As PPC campaigns have grown in popularity and keyword prices and bidding have become more competitive, click fraud is on the rise.

How to Stop Click Fraud?

Most advertisers aware about the possibility of click fraud but generally haven’t done much in the past to prevent it. Other also thought if they complain to the PPC program owners it could ruin their account or earnings.

Companies who do understand and report click fraud to search engine properties have had success receiving refunds for fraudulent clicks. For those advertisers who want to address the possibility of click fraud in PPC campaigns, good option do exists. Advertisers can use general auditing which have been known to compile lists of sites that generate high numbers of clicks but not sales.

Due to click fraud that is advancing frequently, click fraud detection companies and software have been coming out all over the country. Here are some of the companies offer click fraud detection:

ClickDetective – ClickDetective allows you to track return visitors to your site and alerts you if there is evidence that your site may be under attack. Its reports show you every click in real time rather than a summary hours later.
Clicklab – Clicklab employs a score-based click fraud detection system that applies a series of tests to each visitor session and assigns scores. Calculations are made to indicate bad/good sessions to show an advertiser the quality of traffic.

Click fraud is a big problem in search engine marketing in will continue in the future. So it is wise for any online advertiser to implement some auditing system.