Is Click Fraud Depleting your Advertising Dollars? (continued) |
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Competitors Unethical competitors constitute another source of click fraud. This occurs when one company clicks on a competitor’s ad to drain their daily budget and make advertising more expensive, even cost-prohibitive. By quickly depleting your daily advertising budget, competitors remove your ad from the bidding competition, thus pushing their own ads higher at a lower cost. Every dollar you spend on ineffective advertising is a dollar off your bottom line. If you have established a daily spend limit for your PPC ads, every fraudulent click dilutes that limit. Also, as your daily budget is used up, your ads will sink lower in the rankings. Like unscrupulous affiliate partners, your competitors may employ manual or automated means. How Do They Do It? Click fraud can be performed manually or through automated software programs. It can be as simple as a rival clicking on a competitor’s ads to push his advertising costs up. Click fraud schemes can be highly sophisticated as well. A common method is to use online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links. Another alternative uses low-cost workers in India, China and other countries to click on text links and other ads. On May 3, 2004, The Times of India published a widely circulated article, "India's secret army of online ad clickers." The article went on to say "a growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 per month". These fraudulent clicks are harder to trace because they can be spread across large networks of computers.
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