Click fraud is the intentional clicking on ppc ads without any intention of buying the product or service advertised. There are many types of click fraud.
Some of the most important types are,

1) Competitive fraud : This may occur for highly competitive keywords, were the competitor for the keyword clicks on your ads with the intention of wasting/exhausting your budget.

2) Impression fraud : This affects the Google and other engines which rely on CTR(click through rate). The competitor pauses his ad campaign and cause a sudden surge of impression on your ads. Due to this CTR of your ad decreases and so your ad is ranked lower compared to your competitors ad.

3) Network click fraud : This type of click fraud occurs when a syndicate partner who receives contextual ads from a search network, indulges in manufacturing or creating clicks. The networks owner shares the revenue with the publisher based on the number of clicks generated from his site.

Some common symptoms of being affected by click fraud are,

1) Unusual increase in clicks : Suppose a keywords receives 5-10 clicks a day and suddenly it starts receiving 100’s of clicks and the cost of keywords rises, you might be affected by click fraud.

2) Repeated clicks from same IP : When you are getting repeated clicks on your ads from same ip, you might be affected by click fraud.
Click fraud seems to be a major threat to the online ad industry and advertising networks are still finding it very difficult to combat click fraud. So, you always need to be vigilant whether your ads are being affected by click fraud. Click fraud can be minimized by deep forensic analysis of advertiser’s with the help of many third-party click auditing softwares.

Aravindhan

SEO Tags : Click Fraud, Internet marketting, SEM, PPC

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.