Date First Published: 22nd August 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Advertising
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what click fraud is in this article.
Click fraud occurs on pay-per-click (PPC) ads where individuals or bots fraudulently click on ads over and over again solely to artificially increase the advertiser's costs or publisher's advertising revenue. They may manually click on them multiple times or use automated software, scripts, or bots that are programmed to click on these ads and mimic a human clicking on ads without having any interest in the content of the ad. Each ad is clicked multiple times, not just once.
An example of click fraud is an automated bot designed to fraudulently click on PPC ads. Webpages may be set up with those ads and clickbots may be used to click on them. For each click, the advertiser has to pay the scammer. If the click fraud goes undetected, the advertiser's costs will constantly go up. Sometimes, scammers target PPC ads on a web property that they do not own, such as on a different website. The scammer is not aiming to make money from all of those fraudulent clicks, but the advertisers have to pay the publisher for each click, increasing their advertising costs.
A clickbot is a bot that is programmed to perform click fraud. Clickbots will automatically click on ads without user interaction. Simple bots will just access a webpage and click on the desired ad multiple times at a certain interval. These bots are easier to detect. However, well-designed clickbots are programmed to perform actions that a user would take, such as changing the timing between each click, mouse movements and random pauses before performing an action in order to avoid detection and disguise the clicks as coming from legitimate users with interest in the ads.
Clickbots are often installed on lots of different devices that each have a different IP address as hundreds or thousands of clicks coming from a single IP address or device would look suspicious straight away. This network of devices that each run a clickbot is known as a botnet. The botnet may involve thousands or even millions of devices and often run on the devices without the user's knowledge, usually by a malware infection. Although fraudulent clicks can come from a single bot, a single bot is much easier to detect and block than a botnet as the advertising network could simply block that IP address.
Clickbot.A is an example of a clickbot that infected over 100,000 computers within one month and was used for click fraud. The bot was first discovered at SANS' Internet Storm Center in May 2006. Sponsored search results provided by Google were targeted by the scammers and it caused an estimated 50,000 USD in losses.
A click farm is a group of workers that have been assigned to visit certain webpages and click on ads to artificially increase the advertiser's costs or the publisher's revenue. For scammers, using a click farm is less efficient for them and uses much more resources as most scammers do not have access to hundreds of human workers and it is much easier for them to write a few lines of code to create a clickbot. The behaviour of human click farm workers is much more difficult to detect than bot behaviour and can mimic a legitimate user much more easily. This type of click fraud is carried out by human workers.
Click fraud cannot be completely prevented. However, some advertising platforms can automatically detect fraudulent clicks coming from bots. For example, Google uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to filter out invalid clicks before advertisers are charged. Google's Ad Traffic Quality Team also performs manual and offline analysis since these filters cannot be relied on to detect all fraudulent clicks.
The signs of click fraud are:
Advertisers can add IP address exclusions to prevent visitors with certain IP addresses from seeing ads and an AdSense plugin for Google AdSense can block visitors from seeing ads when they click on them multiple times. Other monitoring tools can carefully inspect every ad click to determine whether the clicks are valid or fraudulent.
Click fraud and ad fraud are not the same. Click fraud is a type of ad fraud where individuals or bots fraudulently click on ads over and over again with the sole intention of increasing the advertiser's costs or artificially generating more revenue for the publisher. However, ad fraud is a wider term that refers to all the methods involved in defrauding advertisers. Some of the methods involved in ad fraud are not related to clicks. For example, hidden ads, a type of ad fraud where an ad is shown in a way that it is invisible to the user is a type of ad fraud that targets how much advertisers pay per impressions rather than clicks.
Click fraud are types of invalid clicks. However, invalid clicks also include accidental clicks and other automated traffic that are not genuine user clicks. When invalid clicks are detected, they are flagged and automatically filtered from reports and payments. Sometimes, advertisers may be issued refunds. Accidental clicks are not considered fraudulent clicks as they are not intentional.
Click fraud can cost advertising networks and advertisers a lot of money as they are paying for those fraudulent clicks. From one source, it was estimated that around £5.4 billion was lost due to click fraud in 2016.
Click fraud can also have an effect on website analytics. If bots are visiting a website, all of their activities will be included in that data. This can cause webmasters to be unable to measure the website traffic coming from legitimate users or the effectiveness of an ad. This can become an issue for webmasters that want to find out how their audience is engaging with their content or want accurate information about website traffic. Bots can be difficult to differentiate from legitimate users.
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