If you do PPC advertising, one of the things that you worry about is click fraud. Click fraud typically happens when your ad is displayed on a 3rd party website and the publisher is clicking on the links to make money. There were stories about how some publishers either directly or indirectly got clicks by paying to people sitting at home just for clicking those ads on their pages. Large companies denied the extent of the click fraud and offered very little information. So, yes, if you are a advertiser spending large amounts on advertising, you certainly be worried. However, you also have the choice of turning off the network advertising so that your ads are only displayed on the search results pages. This reduces click fraud because, no one other than the search engine companies can make money by clicking them. Though I would like to just through in a conspiracy theory that every shareholder of one of those big search engine companies can click on a single ad each day and boost the revenue and hence the stock price!
Anyway, now there is an article about competitor fraud. Read this Click fraud? Don’t be a victim blog post. This probably existed in the past as well, but when the economy gets tougher, may be there is more crime online or on the streets. The interesting thing is that this is a real issue. Though the statcounter blog indicates that by monitoring where the clicks came from it’s possible to recognize the competitor and report. But what happens if there is a 3rd party offering such click and exhaust competitor budget type of service? I mean, we all know that the corporate espionage is for real, isn’t it?
