What is click fraud?

Click fraud happens when someone or something clicks an ad, button, or link with the intention of influencing traffic statistics or rankings, usually at a large scale. It is a subset of ad fraud where people or programs click on pay-per-click (PPC) ads without ever having the intention of buying or signing up for the product. It causes advertisers to run out of budget faster, increases their cost per lead, and artificially inflates the revenue of the publisher of the ad. If/when advertisers find out about click fraud, publishers’ reputations may suffer.

Who commits click fraud, and why?

Attackers commit click fraud to take money from advertisers and profit. Often, competitors of the targeted business are in on the action. Some companies encourage employees to click competitor ads or even hire low-wage workers to click competitor ads.

Click fraud is dangerous for publishers too, because it can tarnish the relationship with advertisers. While more clicks might inflate revenue for the publisher in the short term, it could make it look like the publisher is committing click fraud, because the advertiser continues paying the publisher without getting new users.

Click Fraud Protection Strategies

Advertisers have a series of best practices to protect themselves against click fraud, such as only working with reputable publishers or ad networks. You can also keep an eye on your ad campaigns to check for anomalies in cost.

As a publisher, identifying and protecting yourself against click fraud is a bit more complicated. You need to track a few key variables to determine whether you’re suffering from click fraud:

• IP address. Whether there’s a high density of clicks coming from the same or similar IP addresses.
• Click timestamp. Whether there’s a high number of clicks in a very short period of time.
• Action timestamp. Whether there’s a short period of time between someone or something entering the website and clicking on the ad.

As bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they can even fool  webmasters who diligently track the three key variables.

Today’s Bots Require Advanced Protection

DataDome’s bot protection solution defends your mobile apps, websites, and APIs from malicious bots, including click fraud bots. We analyze 100% of requests to your website in real time, needing less than 2 milliseconds to detect whether the visitor is a human or a bot. Bad bots and bot fraud are blocked by default, but you can easily fine-tune the response with your own custom rules.