June 5th, 2009

It should be no great surprise – but it is still amazing to hear about the types of associated fraud:

Phishing Sites

Sending Spam

Pornography (of the most base kind)

Trojans

Bots (unsavoury kind)

Malware

Other Scams

Sometimes, these are carried out at the internet service provider (ISP) level. The authorities would love to catch some of these but it isn’t easy. Avoidance however is easy for a determined fraudster, using technical or geographical advantages.
Looking at scale, click fraud is worst for those paying high click value ads. In a way, having a large budget too, makes the attack worse. For example, lets us consider a 10% [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: Click Fraud, click fraud cost, daily budget, high click value, scale
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July 4th, 2008

Here is an ethical dilemma in the click fraud arena, please leave your point of view in the comment field below. Joe Bloggs is a tech savvy individual who reads many online blogs. Whilst searching for a technical answer, he is directed to a particular site via a search engine query and finds the exact solution he needs. He notices that the site is running Adsense ads, and knowing that the website owner will be rewarded if he clicks on the ad, he selects a potentially useful ad from the list displayed. He clicks [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Features | 3 Comments »

June 30th, 2008

I am seeing a lot of chatter on the net about how click fraud may be used as a tool in the upcoming presedential campaign.

Internet marketing techniques will play a big part in the upcoming campaign, and the ability to deplete a candidate’s ad budget is being seen as a way to support your own candidate.

I have seen a number of Facebook groups advocating this approach, and the following story fell into my RSS reader today:

http://www.dailykos.com/stornly/2008/6/23/18554/9671 (update 2008-10-17: this page no longer seems to be available)

NOTE: As a UK citizen I don’t have a say in this contest, both [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: political click fraud
Posted in News | 2 Comments »

June 29th, 2008

I recently ran a survey on this site to see what type of articles you would like me to write.

The overwhelming result was that you would like to read how-to articles.  With this in mind I have decided to create a lot more detailed articles on protecting your advertising spend from click fraud.

In a 15 part series called How To Stop Click Fraud , I will take readers through the many levels required to correctly protect you ad spend from click fraud.  There is no one solution fits all, this series will look at:

Introduction to click fraud
Competitor Click Fraud
Publisher [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: survey
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

June 28th, 2008

A number of months ago, I wrote an article about gaming Entrecard and asked if it was a type of click fraud.

The crux of this post was that people were creating click bots or drop bots to drop a virtual business card on other peoples blogs in exchange for credits, these credits could then be exchanged for advertising or even sold for hard cash.

I recently received an e-mail from the Entrecard team which backs up what I was thinking about at the time, it is now against the programs code of conduct to run these click bots.

It takes no [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: Gaming EntreCard
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June 20th, 2008

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June 17th, 2008

I would like to show you five good pay per click campaign habits you should adopt to avoid click fraud.

1. Keep an eye on the competition
Do you know who else is competing on your keywords? These are the potential sources of competitor click fraud. Monitor your top ten most expensive keywords and see who is also running ads againt them.

Consider looking up the domain IP range of these companies and adding them to your exclusion lists. If a competitor cannot see your ads, they cannot click on them. NB this only works if they click from [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: Click Fraud, Competitor Click Fraud, publisher click fraud
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June 12th, 2008

A number of months ago I wrote a speculative article on how click fraud could be used as a tool of activists.

The article Low Quality Clicks as a Means of Passive Demonstration painted a fictional picture on how the bottom line of an organisation can be effected by attacks on it’s internet advertising spend.

Whilst monitoring articles posted on the net, I came across this piece called operation deplete on how a group are advocating (using negative language) the clicking of their adversaries adsense ads. It was only a matter of time before my predictions came true.

DISCLAIMER: I do [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: Click Fraud
Posted in Features, News | No Comments »

June 12th, 2008

I am often amazed by the search phrases which bring visitors to my site, it also helps to confirm to me that people are searching for click fraud and low quality click resources so they can commit nefarious acts.

This list will be updated as new entries appear.

how to setup rxbot - 12 Jun 2008
how create fraud clicks
program a clickbot
how to perform click fraud
american idol votes bot

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June 11th, 2008

I was recently working with a client based in the US who had seen a masive increase in click through and no corresponsing increase in conversion. He contacted me with a view to investigate possible click fraud.

As a starting point I obtained an invalid click fraud report (see below). From this we can see an incredibly suspicious increase in clicks and cost per click

I asked for a copy of their web server logs to run through my analysis tool to see what was causing this problem.

The company works in the US mortgage space, a notoriously competitive and [...] Continue Reading…

Tags: Case Studies
Posted in Case Studies, Features | 1 Comment »