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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.