Adsense Click Fraud
If you're using AdWords or
AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the
underworld of computing called "click fraud". But what exactly
is click fraud and how is it accomplished?
Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain
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 attempt to have people clicking
the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.
There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of
fraudulently generating revenue through Google's AdSense
program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks
through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some
rudimentary and simple.
One of the most complex is through the use of so called "hitbots".
These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in
AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners
as well).
Google's AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and
nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection
mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.
Another, more rudimentary method
is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links
on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day
and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from
very poor countries like India, and they're prepared to do so
for just $0.50 an hour.
Of course, there's a problem with this mechanism. Once Google
receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the
address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned,
and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.
To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number
of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are
basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world
(though mostly in the US). What's even more daunting is that
these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so
such scams are really hard to detect.
And don't think this happens only in isolated instances. There
is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.
In fact there's so much 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 very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it
has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while
the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of
click fraud there's certainly room for a lot of improvement.
It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an
AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person
paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent
clicks to be even twice as large.
There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such
as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other's links
(which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so
that they click such links.
Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the
phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google's AdSense
still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to
traditional untargeted advertising schemes.
There are some means of protection against such schemes and all
advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them. Many
advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for
fear of click fraud. |
