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Click fraud
Online Advertising
Click fraud
Click fraud occurs in
pay per click
online advertising when a person, automated script or computer
program imitates a legitimate user of a
web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an
improper
charge per click. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and
increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key
beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not.
Use of a computer to commit this type of
fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions, for example as covered by Penal code
502 in California and the Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. There have been arrests relating to click fraud with regard
to malicious clicking in order to deplete a competitor's advertising budget.
In 2004, a California man created a software program that he claimed could
let spammers defraud Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks.
Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000
to hand over the program.
Pay per click advertising
- Main article:
Pay per click
Pay per click advertising or PPC advertising is when
webmasters
(operators of web sites), acting as publishers, display clickable links
from advertisers, in exchange for a
charge per click. As this industry evolved, a number of advertising
networks developed, who acted as middlemen between these two groups
(publishers and advertisers). Each time a (believed to be) valid web user clicks
on an ad, the advertiser pays the advertising network, who in turn pays the
publisher a share of this money. This revenue sharing system is seen as an
incentive for click fraud.
The largest of the advertising networks,
Google's
AdWords/AdSense
and
Yahoo! Search Marketing, act in a dual role, since they are also publishers
themselves (on their search engines). According to critics, this complex
relationship may create a conflict of interest. For instance, Google loses money
to undetected click fraud when it pays out to the publisher, but it makes money,
when it collects it from the advertiser.
Non-contracting parties
A secondary source of click fraud is non-contracting parties, who are
not part of any pay-per-click agreement. This type of fraud is even harder to
police because perpetrators generally can not be sued for breach of contract, or
charged criminally with fraud. Examples of non-contracting parties are:
- Competitors of advertisers: These parties may wish to harm a
competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads. The
perpetrators don't profit directly, but force advertiser to pay for
irrelevant clicks, thus weakening or eliminating a source of competition.
- Competitors of publishers: These persons may wish to frame a
publisher. It is made to look like the publisher is clicking on their own
ads. The advertising network may then terminate the relationship. Many
publishers rely exclusively on revenue from advertising, and can be put out
of business by such an attack.
- Other malicious intent: As with vandalism, there's an array of
motives for wishing to cause harm to either an advertiser or a publisher,
even by people who have nothing to gain financially. Motives include
political and personal vendettas. These cases are often the hardest to deal
with, since it is hard to track down the culprit, and if found, there is
little legal action that can be taken against them.
- Unwanted "friends" of the publisher: Sometimes upon learning a
publisher profits from ads being clicked, a supporter of the publisher (like
a fan, family member, or personal friend), will click on the ads, to "help".
However, this can backfire when the publisher (not the "friend") is accused
of click fraud.
Advertising networks try to stop fraud by all parties, but often do not know
which clicks are legitimate. Unlike fraud committed by the publisher, it is hard
to know who should pay when past click fraud is found. Publishers resent having
to pay refunds for something that is not their fault. However, advertisers are
adamant that they should not have to pay for phony clicks.
Organization
Click fraud can be as simple as one person starting a small web site,
becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to generate revenue.
Oftentimes, the number of clicks, and their value, is so small, that the fraud
goes undetected. Oftentimes publishers will claim small amounts of such clicking
is an accident, which is often the case.
Much larger scale fraud also occurs. Those engaged in large scale fraud will
often run
scripts, which simulate a human clicking on ads in web pages. However, huge
numbers of clicks appearing to come from just one, or a small number, of
computers, or single geographic area, look highly suspicious to the advertising
network and advertisers. Clicks coming from a computer known to be that of a
publisher, also look suspicious to those watching for click fraud. A person
attempting large scale fraud, alone in their home, stands a good chance of being
caught.
Organized crime can handle this by having many computers, with their own
internet connection, in different geographic locations. Often scripts fail to
mimic true human behavior, so organized crime networks use
Trojan code to turn the average person's machines into zombie computers and
using sporadic redirects or DNS-cache-poisoning to turn the oblivious user's actions into actions
generating revenue for the scammer.
Impression fraud is an insidious variant of click fraud where the advertiser
is penalized for having an unacceptably low
click-through rate for a given
keyword. This
involves making numerous searches for a keyword but without clicking of the ad.
Such keywords are disabled automatically, enabling a competitor's lower-bid ad
for the same keyword to continue while several high bidders (on the first page
of the search results) have been eliminated.
It is very difficult for advertisers, advertising networks, and authorities
to pursue cases against networks of people spread around multiple countries.
Litigation
Disputes over the issue have resulted in a number of
lawsuits. In
one case, Google (acting as both an advertiser and advertising network) won a
lawsuit against a Texas company called Auction Experts (acting as a publisher),
which Google accused of paying people to click on ads that appeared on Auction
Experts' site, costing advertisers $50,000[1].
Despite networks' efforts to stop it, publishers are suspicious of the motives
of the advertising networks, because the advertising network receives money for
each click, even if it is fraudulent.
Solutions
Proving click fraud can be very difficult, since it is hard to know who is
behind a computer and what their intentions are. Often, the best an advertising
network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent, and not
charge the account of the advertiser. Ever more sophisticated means of detection
are used, but none are foolproof.
The pay-per-click industry is lobbying for tighter laws on the issue. Many
hope to have laws that will cover those not bound by contracts.
A number of companies are developing viable solutions for click fraud
identification and are developing intermediary relationships with advertising
networks. Such solutions fall into two categories:
a) Forensic analysis of advertisers' web server log files
This analysis of the advertiser's web server data requires an in-depth look
at the source and behavior of the traffic. As industry standard log files are
used for the analysis, the data is verifiable by advertising networks.
b) Third-party corroboration
Third parties offer web-based solutions that might involve placement of
single-pixel images or Javascript on the advertiser's web pages and suitable
tagging of the ads. The visitor may be presented with a cookie. Visitor
information is then collected in a third-party data store and made available for
download. The better offerings make it easy to highlight suspicious clicks and
they show the reasons for such a conclusion. Since an advertiser's log files can
be tampered with, their accompaniment with corroborating data from a third party
forms a more convincing body of evidence to present to the advertising network.
External links
Home | Up | Pay per click | Click-through rate | AdSense | Googletestad | Click fraud
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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