Click Fraud

March 26, 2006

Click Fraud: The act of clicking on a pay-per-click campaign without the intention of purchasing the product. This may be manually or artificially generated. There are several purposes behind click fraud, which include hurting competition by depleting their advertising budgets, increasing revenue owed to a webmaster for hosting pay-per-click ads (like an adwords member that clicks on their own ads to generate revenue), or inflating traffic reports. Estimates of the percentage of fraudulent clicks on the Internet run as high as 25%. There is software available that can identify possible click fraud, and major search engines offer refunds for clicks that can be identified as such.