Both search engines, Google and Yahoo!, differentiate their paid listings from their free, contextual (otherwise known as "organic" results), usually by featuring the "sponsored links" searches on a different part of the page and by highlighting them in colored boxes. This is one of the quickest ways to pull lots of prospective customers to your web site and to get listed prominently in major search engines. If a visitor clicks on the advertisement served by Google AdSense or Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions, the publisher/webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the revenue that the advertiser is paying Google for the click.
However, both these PPC search engines also experience intermittent, yet explained, "spikes" that demolish your daily or monthly budget in a matter of minutes or hours. It's a little unnerving knowing that you could dissipate a couple thousand dollars in a matter of minutes with absolutely no recourse. Adequately staffed to handle these anomalies, both engines feature customer service representatives who often reply to such technical idiosyncrasies with hostile ambivalence. Both of these search engines employ software that will detect if the person who is advertising, for example, with adsense, they can determine if you are the one committing click fraud, whether by accident or on purpose and will stop those clicks from counting for you.
Sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not - Pay per click fraud is widespread, and prevalent. One of the main reasons that pay per click fraud is so rampant is that there are actually legitimate pieces of software that can used to commit pay per click fraud, although that was not the original intent for their creation. For instance, a click fraud artist may claim that he is just stress testing his analytics software program to ensure that it will catch click fraud. I won't mention which software programs commit click fraud, although a little investigation may turn them up.
Part of the problem with click fraud is that there are not yet any laws on the books dealing with the problem. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claims that they cannot really do anything about the problem because they are tasked with investigating consumer fraud, and cannot fit pay per click fraud into this category. However, the Department of Justice in the United States does have a rapidly growing division that deals with cases of Internet crime, and pay per click fraud will eventually come under their purview. The difficulty is that, even if you suspect you are a victim of click fraud, the onus generally falls on you to prove that it exists and to find those responsible. This is not an easy task.
Click fraud is a risk that goes along with doing any kind of pay per click advertising as part of your Search Engine Marketing strategy. Pay per click advertising can help you be sure that you're getting some kind of return on your advertising investment because you're only paying when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site but not everyone clicking on your ads is interested in your products or services. Click fraud is when someone that has no interest in your products or services repeatedly clicks on your ad just to make you pay more money. It sounds like something that petty and spiteful person would do to one another but click fraud can lead to huge advertising bills for companies who aren't getting anything in return for that money.
Anyone that uses search engine optimization wants to advertise their website and try to get more traffic but the point of using search engine optimization is to reach your target market and get members of your target market to click on your website. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are safer bets than pay per click advertising because of the high risk of click fraud that comes with pay per click advertising. The biggest search engines like Google and Yahoo have built automated click fraud management programs to try and combat the growing problem of click fraud but it still happens everyday to lots of companies.
A larger company might not notice the click fraud until they end up with an advertising bill that is three or four times higher than they expected. When that happens a click fraud management team from the ad company will step in and try to determine if click fraud is responsible but unfortunately the law hasn't quite kept up with the changing technology when it comes to click fraud. There are several large click fraud cases that are still pending in the courts. Companies feel that they shouldn't have to pay huge advertising bills as a result of click fraud and that the ad companies have a responsibility to create a click fraud management system to keep click fraud from happening and the ad companies feel that the companies are responsible for the costs incurred by click fraud.
Click fraud isn't just done by a single person or a group of people sitting at their computers clicking on a company's ad over and over. There are automated programs that are designed to click on an ad thousands of times per day which can mean an astronomical bill for companies without giving them any new business. The new click fraud management programs that are being rolled out by the major ad companies and search engines are alleviating some of the click fraud problem but click fraud will almost always be a risk when you're doing pay per click advertising. Search engine marketing with just plain old search engine optimization is a safer methods to drive traffic to your website although they may or may not drive as much traffic to your website as a few pay per click ads would. A combination of SEO and PPC with the right click fraud protection can be the a great strategy.
Both Keith Londrie & Terry Stanfield are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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