Pay Per Click Fraud With all the popularity among Google, Yahoo, and other advertising programs that webmasters and other companies use to try to promote their product, there is a fair amount of fraudulent activity that goes on inside other walls that will try to reduce the amount of advertising that one company gets. Scammers are able to do this through the very use of the pay per click system. Even though there is no sure-fire way to get rid of this fraudulent activity, there are some definite things that one could do to lessen the effects of what these scammers are trying to accomplish.
The big question in the mind of many people may be, "How do those scammers actually affect the company trying to advertise their product?" The way that pay per click fraud is accomplished is actually very simple. They intentionally click on someone's website and the keywords and ads in that website, which runs down the company's value that they receive for advertising. These scammers are essentially raising the price of these clicks. Because companies track the keywords and ads that receive the most clicks, they often try to adjust the prices accordingly. However, because scammers are the culprit for the clicking of the keywords and ads, there is no benefit to the actual company trying to do the advertising.
Instead of sitting idly by letting the clicks roll through, there is one very important tool that you can use to try to prevent this type of fraudulent activity from happening. This will come in the way of examining your log files of your website constantly. If you notice that you have had a very fast rise in your click rate, this would be a good idea anyway. But what should you look for in your log files? The most important thing to look for is repeated IP addresses being used for the clicks that are happening. If you find that you have received an awful large amount of clicks in a short amount of time, examine the IP addresses to see if they are the same or if they are altogether different. Next, if you want to find out who the culprit is, you can use the American Registry of Internet Numbers. With the IP address in hand, you can type it into their form and submit it to them to find out who, exactly, is producing all of those fraudulent clicks on your website.
If you do find that an individual or company is creating this pay per click fraud, you can then report this activity immediately to your website hosting company and they will more often than not ban them from your website. Another way to prevent the losses of the pay per click fraudulent activity is to diversify your advertising resources and use other ways to advertise. There are plenty of other ways to advertise besides using the Google, Yahoo, and other companies' systems. You can use regular newsletters as well as offline advertising to promote your product or service. However, falling prey to the perpetrators who use pay per click fraud is the exact situation that you want to prevent, so staying on top of your log files is the most important issue in pay per click fraudulent activity. |