For years, this practice has been done as a way to circumvent the system and siphon off money from Internet advertisers.
This practice has become increasingly sophisticated year after year. A study by the University of Baltimore estimates that this type of fraud cost approximately USD $35 billion in 2020 alone.
In this article, I am going to talk about suriname email address how these click and traffic bots work, the main types, and how marketers can minimize the damage.
But let us now understand what are the main reasons for this fraud:
Publisher and affiliate fraud
This type of fraud is quite common. In it, bloggers and affiliates bypass the system by generating fake clicks on ads on their sites.
The logic is this:
The blog owner registers with Google Adsense and frees up several spaces on his website for advertisers to display their products and services. For each click on the advertising banners, they will receive 68% of the amount paid by the advertiser for that click.
To do this, it uses bots that pretend to be real people who click on these ads, or hires people to perform these clicks on a recurring basis.
Competitor Fraud
Unethical, this type of fraud aims to increase your competitor's advertising spend (especially on the search network) by making you lose as much money as possible. This harms the performance and relevance of your ads.
Revenge
Just like with competitor scams, someone could be clicking on your ads to drain your budget. This could be a former employee, former partner, a dissatisfied customer, among other possibilities.
Main sources of fake clicks
Bots
A clickbot is a software programmed to click on links on various websites. Lately, they have become quite sophisticated in imitating various actions that a real user would do, such as: mouse movements, variation in time between clicks, among others.
ADVERTISEMENT
The ultimate goal is to generate the maximum number of clicks for the reasons mentioned above.
Click farms
Whether they can be set up automatically or by human hands, click farms are hired to generate clicks on specific links.
