Click Fraud Blog
Publisher Click Fraud - A Definition
November 13th, 2007
In a series of articles, I will discuss a particular branch of click fraud known as publisher click fraud.
In previous posts I have discussed competitor click fraud,where companies or individuals competing against you in the PPC rankings click on your ads in an attempt to deplete your daily budget, and hopefully remove your ads from the search engines. Publisher click fraud on the other hand is where webmasters syndicating pay per click ads from suppliers such as Google or Yahoo click on their own ads.
Ad Syndication
Syndication of ads is done by most of the major pay per click suppliers, perhaps the most widely used syndication system is Google’s Adsense program.
Using Adsense, webmasters are able to insert a small piece of code into their websites html and Google will display ads on their behalf. Google spiders or automatically reads the sites to find out it’s subject matter. Adverts are then displayed in context with the content of the website.
If a user of the website clicks on the links, a transaction occurs and the advertiser is charged an agreed amount. Google and the webmaster then take a share of this ad revenue.
The syndication and supply of ads on websites is a very common practice and it helps provide a small additional income to a large number of bloggers (including myself), the problem comes when unscrupulous website owners begin clicking on their own ads in an effort to increase their revenues.
How the fraud occurs
Publisher click fraud can happen in three main fashions:
The first is for the website owner or people he or she knows to repeatedly click on ads displayed on the website. This is probably the most ineffective method as it is widely suggested Google and the other search engines have fgilters in place to capture repeated clicks from the same IP address.
The second method is more technical and it involves the use of clickBots. A clickbot is a computer program controlled by a nefarious individual known as a Bot Herder. The Herder uses vulnerabilities in PC’s to create an army of infected computers which will run a program to click on a particular ad. The low noise level of hundreds (or even thousands) of individual IP addresses means this will probably go undetected by automatic filters
Thousands of clicks will occur, and generate substantial income. I reviewed Google’s analysis of a clickbot known as ClickBot.A, and Google state that attacks of this type can generate six figure incomes.
The last method of publisher click attack is via a click farm. Using this method, a small amount of money if paid to staff in the developing world to click on a link and pause on the target site, click on a few links, even sign up for a newsletter in the hope that the activity will appear to be that of a legitimate user. Each of these clicks on a link generate income, as long as the outgoings to the low paid worker are less than the click value, there is profit to be made.
How Much Fraud Happens
It is my opinion that there is a large amount of publisher click fraud happening, I was the subject of an attack whilst publishing Adwords ad on the content network, and Click Forensics, the publisher of the click fraud index have analysed the problem and suggest the percentage of clicks from the Adsense content network is in the 20s percent.
The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That’s up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
In the next post in this series, I will discuss How to Spot Publisher Click Fraud
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