Click fraud can affect any website that has not armed itself against the threat. This is why it is best to buy click fraud prevention, as fraudulent activity messes up the analytics of websites. Multiple websites are targeted at once and repeatedly clicked for several reasons, none of which are good. This article will check out what click fraud means and how it impacts websites.
Definition
Click fraud has a lot to do with pretending to be a genuine visitor to a web page. It can be a person or a bot that clicks on an ad, a hyperlink, or a button that tricks the server or platform into thinking that there is real interaction between visitors and that ad or app.
Click fraud takes place on a large scale and happens more than once. To succeed, click fraudsters use bots that click links repeatedly. Of all internet traffic, about 50% is owed to bots. In that 50%, 20% of the traffic towards ads is the courtesy of fraudulent clicks.
There are several reasons behind click fraud. First, some websites might do it to damage their competitor's budgets. This happens because ads require money and work with a PPC (Pay Per Click) system. Some people have ideological motives.
They try and create artificial likes or upvotes so that an idea seems a lot more popular than it is. The rest, such as cybercriminals, use click fraud to promote malicious web pages to the top of search ranks, helping them seem legitimate.
Its Effects
You might be surprised at how badly it affects a website's analytics. If bots engage with a web page, their activity is surely recorded in their data. But unfortunately, this prevents the website's people from knowing how well their ad is doing.
Not only that, but they would also have no idea how many legitimate viewers the ad reached and what exactly their genuine response towards the ad is. Again, this wrecks a company's efforts when they wish to know how well their content engages with their spectators.
They will not know the accurate numbers on the traffic created or the behaviour of their viewers. Therefore, a strategy that prevents such click fraud is a must for any app, web page, or API that's available all over the internet.
When a strategy like that is missing, malicious bots will hinder a website's content feedback and impact the customer experience and cost a lot of money to the targeted company.
Prevention
Now, how exactly does click fraud prevention work? Detection programs are one of the most popular ways to protect a website. These programs work to detect a probable bot. Google, for example, uses machine learning to separate ad-related and genuine activities from bots.
A manual review process is done after this filtration. Most click fraud protection agencies and programs develop machine learning programs that detect and mitigate click fraud. If a user's activity differs greatly from the regular activity, it is marked as a bot.
For instance, if the user clicks on the ads, it will be marked as a bot.