Ways to Identify and Tackle Click Fraud. Interesting Points to Bear in Mind



Identifying and tracking examples of click fraud is the first step to eradicating the trouble. Click fraud is the colossal drain on the resources of advertisers operating on a national and worldwide scale, estimated to occupy around 30% of all pay per click advertising spend. With so much at stake, its no wonder the search engines are investing so much time and attempt into devising solutions.

One way in which Search Engines and other pay per click programme providers have attempted to restrain the rising click fraud trouble is through introducing IP address repetition algorithms. These formulae are designed to pick up on distrustful click patterns emanating from a singular IP address, which can assist to discover the existence of click farms and competitor-led sabotage, as well as identifying potential fraudsters at source.

But, there is a range of problems with this method of attempting to discover the fraudsters. To begin with, fraudsters logging on through a dialup modem, DSL line or cable modem can almost completely bypass this check, as with every new online session, a new IP address is generated. Furthermore, there is an wide assortment of software offered to change IP addresses, which again can be used for ‘cheating’ the algorithm. Cookie and session tracking are other methods by which search engines can attempt to uncover potential fraudulent activity, but again there are ways around these for the fraudsters.

More comprehensive software is being developed which profiles and reports on the browsing habits of each click-through to allow companies to track and observe distrustful actions, though this could be seen by many as intrusive and unsuccessful as anything on a small scale is still likely to go unnoticed, based on the enormous coverage of ads across the internet.

The trouble of click fraud lately hit the headlines with a class action raised against Google, prompting Google to offer $90million as a possible settlement. Perhaps an acceptance of their responsibilities, Google’s offer goes some way to suggest the extent of click fraud, and its enormous costs to the internet financial system.

There are many self-help remedies that can be implemented to keep an organization out of trouble. The primary of these remedies is the reliance on search engine optimization and organic listings. If a site is well and fully optimized, it could ultimately understand a ranking that another site is willing to pay $2.50 a click for. Also, with organically high rankings there are no clickthrough rates, so the costs associated with PPC are not applicable. Though the process is much more laborious and takes notably longer to observe results, the SEO process is much cheaper in the long run, and with an estimated 25-30% of all clicks being performed fraudulently, an organically high listing can save money which would otherwise be drained by click fraud for more useful reinvestment.

Year on year, as the pay per click advertising market continues to grow and develop, of course click fraud will follow suit. Unless the helpful means of preventing click fraud is developed and successfully implemented, buyers will steadily lose confidence in the advertising medium and turn to more efficient, less wasteful marketing methods, which would badly hit the search engines and could potentially threaten the online economy as a whole.

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