Don't Get Caught With Google Adsense Click Fraud
If you're not familiar with Adsense, it's that program from Google where you place HTML code on your site to display ads. It's a smart way for webmasters to earn some cash by displaying ads alongside their content. But even the best ad networks attract rogue advertisers, and the digital advertising world is rife with scams and fraud at all levels. You need to know how to spot them before they get to you.
We'll show you what click fraud is and why it matters; then we'll walk through a few of the most common types of click frauds, explain how they work, and highlight some ways that click frauds are fighting back against attackers trying to stop them.
It's one thing to talk about click fraud in the abstract, but it's a lot more helpful to see it in action. We'll demonstrate some of the more common techniques by walking through a fake ad that's designed to steal money from the advertiser and deliver none of the promised impressions. We'll show you how we built this ad, what other ads look like on a real website, and how easy or hard it is to detect them.
Throughout this exercise, we're going keep an eye on two important questions: How often do advertisers get burned by ad clicks that don't really happen? And how can they tell? By clicking around on popular websites with Google AdSense ads, we can try to get some answers.
What Is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is the act of generating bogus clicks for the purpose of stealing money. It's a lot like the old joke about why you can't trust lawyers; it's because they're paid to lie. Online, ad click verification systems are being paid to lie about what happens when users interact with ads and this makes it possible for thieves to steal money from advertisers. Advertisers pay money for ad clicks, but with click fraud, some of those users aren't actually clicking on anything at all.
Don't worry if you're not familiar with how Adsense or other advertising networks work; we'll cover that in this article as well. Just know that most online ads are delivered using a system called CPM, or cost per thousand. You see the same ad multiple times, but your computer or mobile device only shows it once, so the advertiser pays for each user who views his ad. That's an easy way for advertisers to estimate how many people are viewing their ad on your site.
Click fraud is the act of generating fraudulent clicks for the purpose of stealing money.
Click fraudsters use a similar approach to estimate how many people are clicking on ads on other advertisers' sites. They create fake users and use those fake people to view ads. Once they have a good estimate, they change the numbers on the spreadsheet and start all over. They're able to do this because there is no third-party verification system to prevent these fraudulent clicks from being counted as legitimate views.
Why Does This Matter?
A click fraudster might appear, at first glance, like an honest competitor trying to make more money online. But that's not how click fraud works; it's about stealing money from advertisers with false views and clicks. Click fraud is a sneaky way for ad-click fraudsters to get paid without doing any real work, and it's one of the biggest problems in online advertising.
It goes back to the old joke about why you can't trust lawyers; it's because they're paid to lie.
This is an effective method for making money, but advertisers and the digital advertising world have worked together to create detection tools that are good enough to fight back against click fraud. But these detection tools aren't perfect, and some ads still slip through; even if you can't detect a fake ad, advertisers might be able to spot where it came from before you do.
How Do Click Frauds Work?
A click fraudster might create an ad and then let it run for a few months before changing one or two little numbers on a spreadsheet. She's probably not going to change the entire list of pixels in an ad, but it's enough to make a real difference. Let's look at an example of what that might look like:
This is an actual ad that's likely being served by one of the major ad networks. You can see what looks like a standard Adsense box, but it doesn't actually act like a standard Adsense box.