Pay Per Click Fraud

It would be really nice if we lived in a world where everybody was honest. Unfortunately, crime is everywhere, even on the Internet. In this particular article, we're going to focus on a particular type of crime called pay per click fraud. This is more common than most people realize. So, if you're going to get into the pay per click arena, you better be prepared for the kind of shenanigans that you're going to run into. Hopefully, this article will at least alert you to the dangers and what to look out for.

To understand pay per click fraud, you first have to understand how the pay per click search engines work and how they are susceptible to this type of fraud.

Pay per click search engines are a certain kind of search engine where the advertiser pays a certain amount for each visitor that comes to his site through the ad that he posts. The good thing about this kind of advertising is that you only pay if a person clicks on your ad. So you don't have to worry about sinking a lot of money into an advertising campaign only to find out that your ad attracted no actual visitors.

On the surface, this would seem to be not only a very effective way to promote your business, given that this is very highly targeted traffic, but also a very safe way to promote it. After all, the only people who are going to go to your site are those who are interested in your product or service, right? Well, in theory, yes. In actual reality, things aren't that cut and dried.

There are several types of pay per click fraud. I'm going to discuss the two most common kind. One is simply, what I would call untargeted targeted traffic and the other I would call just flat our dishonest and at the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to dirty tricks.

The first type of click fraud that I'm going to cover is something that not many people are aware of. On the Internet, there are sites that provide what is called incentive advertising. This is where they pay people, either in the form of money, advertising credits, certificates, bonuses, gifts and an assortment of other goodies to go to websites all over the Internet. Unfortunately, this traffic isn't really targeted because the only reason they are going to these sites is to get their payoff. Well, what makes this even worse is when these people are paid to go to sites via pay per click ads. What happens now is that the people running these ads are paying for clicks that in reality aren't real at all.

Some people would claim that this isn't pay per click fraud at all. I beg to differ. If you're sending somebody to a site who has absolutely no interest in the product or service that's there and this act costs advertisers money, that is fraud in my book.

But the worst offenders are those who intentionally sabotage a pay per click campaign by sending bogus clicks to a competitors campaign in order to ruin his click through rate and thus raise his minimum bids and lower his position in the standings for those keywords. Yes, this really does take place.

If you're running a pay per click campaign, pay careful attention to the clicks you get each day. If you suspect click fraud, check the IP addresses of where the clicks are coming from. In many cases you will find that multiple clicks are coming from one place. If that happens, report it to the search engine you're dealing with.

Pay per click fraud is real and it's damaging. But if you know what to look out for, you can stop it before it gets out of control.

To YOUR Success