Click Fraud and What To Do About It

Click fraud is the practice of clicking on pay-per-click ads
in order to generate income for the clicker or
support costs for competitors.

A website can have a number of ads that generate a small
income for every click on every ad. The cost of such ads may
be paid directly by the owner of the advertising
website or may be paid through sponsored links provided by
Google or other search engines. The owner of a website owner
can generate revenue for the website simply manually
clicking on the ads several times each day. An automated
Script program or computer can also be used to generate
click and automation, which can generate a large amount of
traffic.

Many Web sites can use the same keywords to advertise
Google AdWords program. The directors of each site
can bid for keywords and set a daily limit for
the amount of money spent per click. If a site
administrator has set a daily limit for clicks, or its
its competitors can deplete your daily budget by clicking
repeatedly on sponsored links. After running the daily
budget, only ads of competitor are shown and generate
Traffic for real visitors.

Click fraud can cost you and then be able to identify
you can save money.

As mentioned previously, click fraud can be committed by manual
click on ads or programs. A computer program
run the ticking can operate a computer or can
be distributed among multiple computers on the Internet - for
as computers that are remotely controlled by hackers.

Click fraud detection can be relatively easy or difficult
depending on the extent to which it is executed and how
is made. If competitors clicking on your ads on Google
a couple of times a day, is unlikely to be able to discern
this to be legitimate clicks from potential
customers. But if a computer program is run by a
single computer which generates a large number of shots,
this is fairly easy to detect. By analyzing the log files
that your hosting company provide, you can
for detecting an amount sudden large traffic from
a specific IP address. If fraud is ongoing, however, click
perpetrated by a network of distributed computers then
detection is more challenging. The first sign you want
notice is that the traffic to your website is increased for any
apparent reason. Detection is based on the fact that
Computer programs are more likely to behave in a repetitive
fashion of human beings.

This is what you seek:

* You suddenly have a lot of traffic from a
certain website or search engine?

* Has the traffic to your website changed, so sudden
get more traffic from certain browsers or operating
systems?

* These are the paths of the visitors suddenly changed for no
particular reason, for example in a more visitors now visit
only the home page?

* It 'a smaller percentage of your visitors to purchase a tract
your products or signing up for your service?

If you believe that you may be a victim of click fraud
can contact the hosting company and ask for their help. If
you are using sponsored links with a search engine
You can contact support to search engines and
you can help with the investigation. Using a computer to bind
this type of fraud is a crime in many jurisdictions, for
as an example of the penal code 502 in California and the
Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. If you
the victim of click fraud then report to the appropriate
authorities.

Links:

http://www.statcounter.com

Statistics for your site. By inserting a small piece of
StatCounter code on your web pages and keeps track of traffic
generates statistics for it

http://www.weblogexpert.com

Program for the analysis of log files provided by
hosting company. WeblogExpert offers a free version with
limited functionality and as well as a full version with
additional features.

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