Click fraud

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As click fraud refers to a type of Internet fraud that primarily on per click coated banner impressions (see pay per click ) pathway. Commercial advertising spaces are clicked or such clicks are simulated in order to manipulate the underlying accounting systems in a targeted manner.

Click fraudsters can proceed manually or with the help of programs .

motivation

The motivation for click fraud is different and can generally be divided into two types:

  • Gaining a competitive advantage (mainly through competing advertising companies)
  • Surreptitious achievement

The following types of competitive advantage are usually intended by the click fraudster:

  • Maxing out the advertising budget of a competitor and thus deactivating their advertising banners
  • Generate additional advertising costs for competitors
  • Among advertising partners ( publishers ): Provoking the exclusion of a competing advertising partner

If services are to be obtained fraudulently, they are usually the following:

  • Direct additional income by clicking on your own advertisements to generate additional income.
  • Indirect additional income by clicking on ads on a specific topic to drive up the per-click price.

After the pay-per-click providers such as Google take rigorous action against advertising partners who steal services through click fraud, the main motivation will be to be found primarily in the competitive advantage.

Countermeasures

Pay-per-click forms of advertising are principally aimed at an anonymous target group and often only have limited options for monitoring success. Using the example of Google Adwords , success control is only possible if the advertiser (who pays for the clicks) incorporates appropriate mechanisms into his website. A comparatively good success control of the click and purchase behavior is made possible by services such as Google Analytics, which however requires a complete server-side implementation on the advertiser's website.

Since this mechanism of success monitoring depends on the advertiser and cannot be generally assumed, the pay-per-click providers mainly have empirical methods at their disposal. Fluctuations in the number of clicks or suspicious click patterns are searched for in order to identify invalid clicks (if they occur in significant numbers) relatively accurately. In order to determine individual clicks and their cause, this data must be compared with the log files of the web server. Internet service providers such as B. Telekom determine the individual connection from which was clicked. However, these data are i. d. Usually only made available at the request of the public prosecutor's office in criminal proceedings and are also provided by Internet service providers i. d. Usually only saved for a period of six months.

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