Online Advertising Survival: Combating Click Fraud - University of ...

users who performed the advertiser’s desired action, such as places order, and measuresthe quality of the product or service being promoted.While there are the obvious benefits of pay per click advertising, there is also thenegative aspect, the manipulation of traffic through click fraud.5. What is Click Fraud?Click fraud is a scheme that takes advantage of the pay per click advertising programslike those offered by Google, Yahoo and others. It is defined as the practice of surfingwebsites and willfully clicking on the advertisements with the intention of falselyincreasing clicks to defraud advertisers or Web sites that provide venues for theadvertisers. Each click on an advertisement costs the retailer money. While the cost perclick is small, the numbers can add up quickly. Click fraud can be perpetrated usingeither manual or automated processes via a clickbot. The irony is, despite its name, clickfraud is not considered illegal as there are no specific laws against it. At least, there areno laws yet.What constitutes a fraudulent click? Yahoo! Search Marketing looks at the identifiablebehavior that may indicate bad faith. They define click fraud as detected illegitimate botsand certain repetitive clicks. Others define a fraudulent click as a click on an ad with nogenuine interest or intention of providing any value to the advertiser. Google does notmake reference to “click fraud” and only distinguishes between “valid or invalid” clicks.14