What is “click fraud” really?

What is “click fraud”?

I was once having this issue with Adsense (Update: Adsense reinstated my account, will see along). They just sent me an email and my Adsense account was disabled in the same time without any warning from them. Emailed them immediately but no response from them at all. They just let me stuck alone in the dark without knowing what is “click fraud” that they were referring. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gave up on them by now, but not for “click fraud” issue. I want to know more on this term so that I can protect or prepare myself in future (if) when other advertisers bring up this “click fraud”  issue again.

I think most of us knew that ‘click fraud’ impacts the entire online advertising industry. This problem has existed as long as advertising online has existed. There are two primary methods of generating invalid, fraudulent clicks: manual clicking (by humans) and automated clicking (by software). A commonly discussed example of manual ‘click fraud’ is when a competitor clicks on advertisements in an effort to drain a marketing budget. A related example of automated ‘click fraud’ is where a competitor finds a way to create a software program that automatically clicks on the advertisement of a competitor. Each click under either scenario is so called a low-quality click. There are other types of low-quality clicks that are sometimes categorized as “click fraud”, such as search engine spiders/bots. These low-quality clicks may be caused by link-checking software or search engine robots clicking on advertisements as they crawl Web pages and run their routines that are typically designed to improve the speed of search.

How do advertiser combat these types of ‘click fraud’?

They use a variety of methods to identify fraudulent clicks, including looking for patterns in the originating computer, requested advertisement, browser type, timing, conversion, filtrations and other factors. When they find clicks that appear to be fraudulent, they can block them in real-time. They have systems and processes in place that allow them to consistently remove fraudulent traffic from the network. Still, we should be aware by now that these and other forms of ‘click fraud’ exist online and neither we, nor any of their competitors to their knowledge, offer any guarantees that the traffic is immune from low-quality clicks.

Bottom line

I can’t really find a solid convincing fact (for myself) to support “click fraud” for my previous case and there are too many so called uncertain area for advertisers to play with. I think the bottom line is they need to provide us with evidence if they wanted to close our account or at least give us a warning/alert or something to notice us before resolve to the final resolution. Wouldn’t it be more ethical?

But it’s really up to the advertisers to make the call and cancel your account (whether you site are too good such as this case or too much ‘click fraud’ issue) because we have signed up under a “terms and condition” which is favor to them at the first place and you can’t sue them really Even sometime you play by the rules, but at the end it is the rules go against you.

Don't bother the posts below, but if you are free, why not?

1. Spot the difference
2. Update: Adsense reinstated IncrediMail
3. Howto: Google Adsense
4. What makes us click?
5. Yahoo Can Grow Faster Than Google?

Tags: adsense, advertiser, click, fraud, google, publisher