KDnuggets News 07:06, item 21, Publications

KDnuggets : News : 2007 : n06 : item21

Publications

From: Vincent Granville
Date: 25 Mar 2007
Subject: Click Fraud: New Definition and Methodology to Assess Generic Traffic Quality

1. What is click fraud?

Click fraud is usually defined as the act of purposely clicking on ads on pay-per-click programs with no interest in the target web site. Two types of fraud are usually mentioned:

An advertiser clicking on competitor ads to deplete their ad spend budgets, with fraud frequently taking place early in the morning and through multiple distribution partners: AOL, Ask.com, MSN, Google, Yahoo, etc.

A malicious distribution partner trying to increase its income, using clickbots or paid human beings to generate traffic that looks like genuine clicks.

While these are two important sources of non-converting traffic, there are many other sources of poor traffic. Some of them are sometimes referred to as invalid clicks rather than click fraud, but from the advertiser or publisher viewpoint, there is no difference. In this paper, we are considering all types of non billable or partially billable traffic, whether it is the result of fraud or not, whether there is or there is no intent to defraud, and whether there is or there is not a financial incentive to generate the traffic in question. These sources of undesirable traffic include:

Accidental fraud: a home-made robot not designed for click fraud purposes, running loose, out of control, clicking on every links, possibly because of a design flaw. An example is a robot run by spammers harvesting email addresses. This robot was not designed for click fraud purposes, nevertheless ended up costing money to advertisers.