ONLINE ADVERTISING
What is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is an illegal type of online adverting fraud that occurs on online in pay-per-click (PPC) where ad clicks are generated by human or click-bot for the only purpose of generating revenues or creating damage maliciously, which has no potential to generate any sales.
Click fraud is considered to be a black-hat technique of falsely inflating the number of clicks on a pay-per-click ad. Click fraud is usually driven by one of two incentives: hurt advertisers as it drives their advertising total spent causing them to remove ads or ad publishers that are clicking on their the ads displayed on their own websites to generate more revenue for themselves.
These fake clicks on your paid ads can cost anything from a few pennies to well over one hundred dollars, depending on the CPC (cost-per-click) of your ad.
Click fraud can affect any form of paid ad, which can include your paid search results, banner ads, video ads or native ad content.
A recent study by the University of Baltimore found that, global click fraud cost is set to cost marketers over $25 billion.
How does Click Fraud Work?
Click Fraud is working in one of 2 ways:
1) Advertisers or marketers competing on the same keywords, clicking on ads, driving the cost of ads and total advertising expense up, causing the advertisers to remove the ads for these keywords following a drop with the cost-per-click for these keywords.
2) Publishers selling pay-per-click ads are clicking on the ads to drive revenues up.
Is Click Fraud Illegal?
Yes, click fraud is totally illegal and is covered within the US by Burke of the District of Delaware held that “Click Fraud” violates the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
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