Click Fraud

If you use AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called "click fraud". But what exactly is click fraud and how is it done?

Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that allocates a certain sum of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time someone clicks on the banner said. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking on ads just so they can earn a higher income.

There are people creating sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google's AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.
One of the more complex through the use of so-called "hitbots. These are automated programs that emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some who made the banner and click).

Google AdSense protection scheme is not perfect and almost anyone can find the details to overcome the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.

Another method is to hire more rudimentary many people in a poor country to click on the links on your site. This means that these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and are willing to do so for only 0.50 euro per hour.

Of course, there is a problem with this mechanism. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.

To avoid this, many people use a large number of proxy servers in order to click.These are basically trojans, located on computers around the world (although mostly in the U.S.). What is even more disheartening is that these clicks appear to come from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

And do not think this happens only in isolated cases. There are many illegal activities in this field.

In fact, there is so much that if search engines did not increase their security with such programs as AdSense, these behaviors may become more criminals become more damaging.
Google has a strict policy regarding click fraud, and continued using these techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud, there is certainly considerable room for improvement.


It is estimated that over 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe that the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

There are many more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers by clicking links on each other (which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they click on those links.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional models of advertising untargeted.


There are ways to protect against such schemes and all advertisers should be informed enough to use them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud....