Click Fraud – How do you protect against it?
All newcomer advertisers and those having been already placing their ads or the advertising for other people in the Internet have probably faced the problem of click fraud.
There are always people willing to eliminate their competitors in advertising. The sellers of goods and services may try to remove the advertising of the same products for the buyers to have no choice. They simply click on the ads thereby depriving the competitor of the opportunity to show the products to the target clients due to the limited budget.
This can be done manually if there are not so much targeted queries and having enough time. And it is possible to use the special software solutions – bots, when the developers of these bots are directly interested in click fraud. In most of cases the offended customers who were badly served or bought the defected goods etc., make the click fraud of the ads. And sometimes the ad sites owners can get the ad impressions and clicks worked up to get more profit.
According to the article published by Adometry it turns out, that the world market of contextual advertising in 2013 has amounted to more than $3,14 billion per month or about $40 billion per year, and the click fraud level has come out to $6 billion per year. The market volume of click fraud protection is 10% of click fraud market and is amounted to $ 600 million per year.
And according to the research data of Incapsula’s Blog Traffic Report from 2012 to 2013, the volume of bot traffic has increased to more than 10% and by the end of 2013 it has amounted to 61,5% of the whole internet traffic.
By the end of 2014 this data has considerably increased, because the internet trading and the internet advertising are very popular in all countries.
Of course it is possible to have the protection from fraud. Nowadays there are many software solutions offering click fraud protection, such as Adometry or ClickForensics. But most of them are focused to big companies with big amount of ads and customized filters settings.
So the ScroogeFrog.com service (more known in ex-USSR states as ClickFrog.ru) has been actively going forward in the Eastern Europe for the last years. It allows to be set up in the advertising networks accounts, for example Google AdWords, to provide the additional protection by means of blocking the ad impression for fraudulent IPs and ad sites.
Each advertiser selects the ad site being oriented to the users’ coverage, CPI/CPC, traffic quality, operational comfort and so on. But everybody must understand that the bots will present in any network, and however the ad networks owners state that they protect their networks from fraud and clean the incoming traffic, the advertisers remain the most interested party in this point. Each advertiser must himself search for additional ways to clean and improve the traffic quality.
