Definition
One of the biggest issues facing the online advertising industry today is click fraud. A very large portion of online campaigns rely on click through rate (CTR) as a measure of success or some variation thereof. Hence, if the clicks being registered are fraudulent then that will throws off the entire foundation of assessing the success online campaigns.
Some click frauds are malicious while others are innocent. Whatever the case maybe both types of click frauds are undesirable. A malicious click fraud could be performed by an advertiser or a publisher. In either case a bot (short for a robot) or a person is involved who intentionally clicking on ads. A publisher would do this to artificially make the performance of their site look good. An advertiser would do this to their competitor who has bought search terms on CPC (cost-per-click) basis to reduce their budget and hence advertising power.
An innocent click fraud could be mistakenly performed by a search engine crawler who crawls a page and every link on the page. Some of these links are clicks tracking links for the advertisement on the page. Most of the ads are delivered using Javascript these days. As a result, merely crawling pages with ads on them will not cause an impression or a click. This is so because to cause an impression to load or a click to happen the Javascript has to be executed and rendered by the crawlers. Since they don’t do that, chances of them causing lots on unwanted clicks and impressions is quite low. Older technology for delivering ads could suffer from this kind of click fraud. There are some web proxy software that try to cache pages of a sites to make them quickly accessible for their users. They might unintentionally causes fake impressions and clicks.
Detecting: Detecting click fraud, as and when it happens, is an important ingredient in delivering a successful campaign. Most of the sophisticated ad servers rely on an auto optimizer to deliver a campaign where it is performing well. A click fraud might look like a well performing website and the optimizer might decide to run more impressions on those fraudulent sites.
If the answer to any of the following question is ‘yes’ for your campaign then you might be getting fraudulent clicks:
- Is the campaign receiving an unusually high click through rate compared to the historical CTR of the campaign?
- Is the proportion of clicks from one site unusually high compared to other sites?
- Are all the clicks registered within a small duration of time apart from each other?
- Are all the clicks coming from one page on a single publisher?
- Are all the clicks coming from one IP address?
- Are there lots of clicks (good CTR) and no or low conversions for your campaign? (This could also be a case of mismatched audience).
Mitigation: Click fraud detection is bigger of a challenge then its mitigation. Once the reason and source of click fraud has been detected, it can easily be prevented by either blocking the sites or the user IP as the case maybe.
A constant lookout of click fraud has to be done while running any campaign. If you see the suspicious behavior or performance metrics for a campaign you should immediately look at the underlying data and verify that the impressions and clicks are indeed genuine. We bonus all impressions and clicks to our advertiser that we identify as fraudulent.
