Click fraud: a growing danger for making money online

How people make money online from advertisements: you put some banners on your website, the advertiser pays for the number of times users see those banners (CPM – Cost per mile) or pay for the number of clicks (CPC - Cost per click). Those are the main ways to get money from advertisements, but of course there are variations, but I won’t discuss them.

Top 10 countries that lead in click fraud traffic

What’s the biggest growing danger for advertisers and publishers? Click fraud, which is an invalid click, on purpose (attempted click fraud) or not (innoculous invalid) to alter statistics or increase earnings for the publisher. Click fraud is also use to deceive advertisement programs (like Google Adsense) to exclude a certain publisher from the system because it uses unfair techniques to increase its earnings.

What’s the danger?

For the advertiser it’s hard to calculate its ROI and in time it will see that advertisements don’t result in sales increase. After it sees that the obvious outcome is that it starts paying less to publishers. As you can see this is a circle that affects everyone in long term as we all know that trust is gained hard and gets lost easy.

Click fraud statistics

A report submitted by Anchor Intelligence show that the percentage of click fraud in advertisements system reached a very alarming 22.9%. Vietnam is leading with a 49.7% percentage while, Canada is second with 28.7 %, while USA is third with 27.3 %, but it has the highest indexed volume of clicks and this makes it the worst.

A map of quality traffic on the globe shows that Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South America (minus Brazil) are the regions with less click fraud, but as traffic increases is likely the percentage of valid clicks will decrease in time.

Global report click fraud traffic quality