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

exhausted, the attackers benefit by receiving all the legitimate advertising clicks that thecompetitors may have obtained. This is more of a problem for small business ownerswithout the funds for the unbudgeted expenditures. The longer term goal is to make payper click advertising too expensive for the competitor and thus completely removing thecompetitor from the search engine results.Impression fraud is a form of click fraud also against competitors. Ad impressions arethe number of times an advertisement is rendered for viewing by the search engine andimpacts the advertisers click through rate. Impression fraud manipulates the number ofpage impressions for a given search term to drive down a competitors click through rate.When an advertiser’s relative click through rate decreases, his search term can besuspended because of low click through rate performance. Google suspendsadvertisements once the click through rate hits 0.5%. By sabotaging the competitor andeliminating their advertisements, the perpetrator can then take advantage to obtain highersearch rankings at lower costs.7.5 Personal / Political AgendaSome click fraud is motivated not by greed but malicious intent, personal or politicalvendettas. Competitors click on advertisements to make it look as though the Web siteoperator or affiliate network itself has been perpetrating the click fraud. This is akin to20