Date First Published: 29th August 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Advertising
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what ad fraud is in this article.
Ad fraud is the use of deception techniques to artificially increase the advertiser's costs for financial gain. Ad fraud often tricks advertisers into thinking that fake traffic that is useless to them is traffic coming from legitimate users. There are a number of methods that scammers use to deceive advertisers and fraudulently represent online ad impressions, clicks, or conversions in order to generate revenue. Bot management tools, such as Cloudflare Bot Management can help detect and prevent ad fraud by identifying the users likely to be bots and filtering out malicious bot activity.
Types of ad fraud include:
The most common type of ad fraud. Click fraud is the practice of fraudulently clicking on ads manually or using clickbots to artificially increase the advertiser's cost or publisher's revenue. Scammers can use botnets to generate thousands of fraudulent clicks. For more information on click fraud, see this article.
When the publisher places multiple ads on a page in one single spot. Multiple ads are stacked on top of each other in order to generate more impressions when people view them in a way that only the top one is visible. This type of ad fraud targets how much advertisers pay per impression rather than clicks.
The process of placing ads in a tiny 1x1 pixel so that the ad is invisible to the human eyes. Similar to ad stacking, scammers might embed an ad with tiny, fraudulent pixels. Users are unaware that they are viewing multiple ads when they load the page and the scammer generates revenue from the fraudulent impressions from the hidden ads.
When a scammer creates a website and uses keyword stuffing by placing an unnecessarily large amount of keywords onto a page to artificially boost the search engine ranking of their website. Scammers focus on popular keywords with a high cost per click (CPC). Advertisers that these keywords are relevant for then buy ads on the fake websites. They have little chance of being seen.
When a scammer gives a misleading idea of the domain name an ad is to be placed as a legitimate website. For example, the publisher of a website offering downloads to harmful computer programs might pretend to be associated with the website for a legitimate computer program download site. It is a method of making advertisers think that fake websites are those of reputable publishers.
When a scammer tries to avoid click fraud detection by using a VPN or proxy server to change geographical location.
Publishers ask users who have no interest in the ad to click on them, often by forcible methods in order to increase their advertising revenue (e.g. not allowing them to view a page unless they click on an ad).
Scammers use bots to watch video-based ads to artificially increase ad impressions and generate revenue for the target website.
Scammers try and disguise their ads as legitimate buttons or images so that they cannot be differentiated from the content in order to trick users into clicking on them and making money from all of the clicks.
When a scammer redirects a click on one ad to a click for another ad. Scammers can steal clicks from other ads by using this method. In order for clicks to be hijacked, the scammer has to compromise the user's computer, ad publisher's website, or proxy server.
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