If you are using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called “click fraudâ€. But what exactly is click fraud & how is it accomplished? Well AdSense makes use of a payment mechanism that awards a sure amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the try to have people clicking the ads so that they can earn a greater income. There’s people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google’s AdSense program. These users accomplish an amazing number of clicks through lots of methods, some complex & sophisticated & some rudimentary & simple. One of the most complex is through the use of so called “hitbotsâ€. These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there’s some that actually click the banners as well). Google’s AdSense protection system is by no means ideal & someone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically by doing a Google search. Another, more rudimentary technique is to hire lots of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day & click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from poor countries like India, & they are prepared to do so for $0.50 an hour. Of coursework, there is an issue with this mechanism. Five times Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address & the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, & the forbidden behavior might even get the fraudster sued. To prevent this from happening, lots of people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are fundamentally trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What is even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are hard to detect. & don’t think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain. In fact there is a lot that if search engine companies don’t increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging. Google has a strict policyowner regarding click fraud, & it’s sued those employing such techniques historically. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there is definitely room for lots of improvement. It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are done in order to get money from the person paying for the commercial. Some people think the number of fraudulent clicks to be even one time as large. There’s a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other’s links (which is often called “clicking ringsâ€, or spamming people so that they click such links. Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is definitely raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this marketing with Google’s AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as against traditional untargeted marketing schemes. There’s some means of protection against such schemes & all advertisers ought to be savvy to employ them. Lots of advertisers select to keep away from the content network all together for fear of click fraud.
this is the reason why i always only advertise to the search engines and not to the publisher network
Hey,you have written right about the concept of AdWords or AdSense.This is the valuable information for those people who does not know about this wrong work.
This is a copied 5 year old article. Click fraud almost never happens anymore and whenever people try they get caught.
I must disagree with most people who have replied. A huge amount of assumptions have been made here, such as most proxy servers being the US and hourly rate clickers coming from India etc. There is simply no references or citations to any statement made, it is all guessed judgements.
It happened... 5 years ago... when this article was published... then google developed the best click fraud protection ever.
I was approached by some digital pointers concerning this click fraud, but trust me, I know how to handle this