One
of the biggest threats to the continued growth of Search
Advertising is the increasing plague of click fraud. Although
there are varying forms of click fraud, most people define it as
any click generated, and paid for, where the intent is to drain
the advertiser's budget. Advertisers know some clicks are more
qualified than others, and not every visitor from their PPC
campaigns will convert to a customer. But, they have a right to
expect that the traffic they are paying for is coming from
people at least marginally interested in their products or
services.
What Motivates Click Fraud?
Why does click fraud exist? What motivates people to deceive
the system by sending PPC advertisers bogus traffic? The short
answer (as usual) is money.
Many Pay Per Click Advertising networks are partially, (or in
some cases totally), dependent on affiliate sites to generate
traffic for their advertisers. These networks syndicate their
customer's ads so they will appear on the sites of their
affiliates. Every time someone clicks on an ad the PPC Network
and the affiliate site share the revenue. The more clicks the
affiliate site generates, the more money it makes. While the
vast majority of affiliates are legitimate trustworthy sites,
others are in the business of exploiting loopholes in the system
to line their pockets with real money by generating fake clicks.
Often times the weapon of choice used by these rogue sites to
cheat the system is a software script that automatically clicks
on PPC ads.
Another variation of click fraud uses a more personal touch
to steal advertiser's money. In the hyper-competitive world of
Pay Per Click Advertising the battle for premium positioning at
an affordable cost can cause companies to use less than ethical
techniques to gain an edge. Companies can drive up their
competitor's marketing costs by clicking on their Pay Per Click
ads. If their competitor's marketing costs get too high they may
lower the bids on their keywords, or stop bidding on the word
altogether. Either way, the cost for the word goes down, giving
the fraudulent company an opportunity to increase their ranking
on the page at a lower cost.
The Search Engine's Response To Click Fraud.
All the Pay Per Click Search engines have systems in place to
detect click fraud, and screen questionable clicks. One example
of how they do this is by keying in on the IP address where the
click originated from. If they see too many clicks coming form
the same IP in a short period of time they will often screen the
traffic.
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The Search Engines are in a unique position when it comes to
Click Fraud. On the one hand they benefit from it. The amount of
revenue attributed to Click Fraud varies depending on who you
ask, but everyone agrees that if illegitimate clicks were
completely eliminated, all the major Search Engines would suffer
a significant hit to their revenues and stock prices. However,
the Search Engines also realize that the long term health of the
industry depends on establishing trust with their advertiser
base. Going forward we can expect to see Search Engines deploy
increasingly sophisticated methods to eliminate fraud, and
corresponding responses from the dark side of the Search
Advertising industry.
Decreasing The Amount Of Click Fraud For Your Campaigns.
While it's impossible to completely eliminate fraudulent
traffic, there are some things you can do to increase the
percentage of good traffic from your investment in Pay per Click
Advertising.
As a rule of thumb, the more a Pay Per Click Ad network
depends on affiliates for its traffic, the more susceptible it
will be to fraud. The reason why the overall traffic quality is
better on Google, Yahoo and Lycos is that each of these sites
has their own branded destination where consumers go to search.
If you advertise on these sites you know where your ads will
appear (although even these bigger sites use affiliates to
varying degrees). Once you venture into the second tier Pay Per
Click networks however you'll find that almost all of their
traffic is generated through partner sites. Companies like
Kanoodle, Enhance etc...don't own sites where people go to
search the web. Nearly all their traffic is generated through
their affiliates which makes it more difficult to control fraud.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, click fraud is a necessary evil of Pay Per
Click Advertising, at least for now. However, as with most
aspects of PPC Advertising everything eventually boils down to
conversions and profits. If your campaigns are generating enough
quality traffic to meet your conversion metrics you should
continue to invest in the campaign, even if some of the clicks
are fake. If your traffic is riddled with too many automated
clicks it will eventually become obvious in your conversion
numbers, and you should stop the campaign and put your money
into pay Per Click networks that control more of their own
traffic.
