Click Fraud

So Friday we were talking about click fraud in class and Professor Brown was showing us an article about it on one of our assigned blogs. And of course I had to ask a stupid question about detecting click fraud and the Professor Brown quickly assigned me the task of reading the article and blogging about it. So here it is...
Click fraud is when people make programs whose only purpose is to click on advertisements over and over again, and thus these clicks do not represent authentic traffic to these advertisements. Advertisers are concerned about this problem because on many sites such as Google, advertisers are charged for their adds based on the number of clicks they receive. To appease these angry advertisers, Google devised a three step program to try to cut down on fraudulent clicking. The first two steps of the system are referred to as proactive click detection and the last step is reactive click detection. In the proactive steps Google devised a set of algorithms as well as other techniques to detect fraudulent clicks and catch them before the advertiser is ever charged for these fake clicks. Most of the fraudulent clicks are caught in these two steps. In the reactive step the advertiser complains to Google about a potential problem and Google goes back to investigate those clicks, this represents a small percentage of fraudulent clicks that Google catches.
The article goes on to say that the problem with click fraud is those clicks that actually effect the advertisers by making them have to pay more versus those clicks that just happen and are caught or otherwise do not cause any other harm for the advertiser. So click fraud is only a problem if it effects the advertiser, if it just happens and the click protections systems catch them there is no harm done and its irrelevant that the clicks happened in the first place. So the goal is not to stop click fraud necessarily, but to make the blockers more effective.
Out of all the clicks on ads, only a small percentage are actually fraudulent, but to be extra careful Google rules out a number of probably not fraudulent clicks as fraudulent with out ever charging the advertiser. This actually ends up costing Google hundreds of millions each year in forgone advertising revenue. For example as a rule Google rules out double clicks and deems these clicks invalid. This is the proactive part of the system. As for the reactive approach, when an advertiser believes there might have been fraudulent clicks on their advertisements they askGoogle to do an investigation. If Google does find these clicks to be fraudulent after their investigation, the advertiser is credited back for the invalid clicks.
Even though there may be fraudulent clickers out there Google is trying hard to curb this type of activity by catching as many as possible fraudulent clicks, as it is the pay per click payment structure is beneficial to advertisers because they are only charged when a customer clicks on their ad and also this is a way for the advertisers to gauge the performance of their ad campaign.
Read the article at: Invalid Clicks – Google’s Overall Numbers