Click fraud? Let Google explains it.

My friend and I just discussed 2 months ago about click fraud, that was with regards to increasing incentives from Google adsense, a sponsored link from Google’s advertisers you can install or put on your website or blog. When somebody visits your site and have clicked one of the advertiser’s links and surf the site or any other activities the clicker might do, you might have earn from it. But of course I don’t exactly know how to ratio my earnings base from the info on my adsense account. I can not maximize my earnings and now I here is the truth about this so called click fraud issue.

I have done some research and get this information. Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a certain person, Botnet, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Botnet is a slang term for a collection of software robots, or bots, that run separately and automatically. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key recipient of the fraud.

Still you have the option to believe it. Click fraud is a very complex issue. Unfortunately, much of the information available has been misinterpreted due to that complexity. Shuman Ghosemajumder of Google gives some information that will hopefully clear up that gray area.

For starters, click fraud is driven by 2 major incentives:

1. Attacking advertisers - when an advertiser tries to hide one of his competitors
2. Inflating affiliates - when an AdSense publisher tries to fraudulently increase his own revenue by generating false clicks.

Methods of click fraud stem from simplistic techniques to sophisticated techniques. Simplistic methods include manual clicks such as when a fraudster personally clicks ads on his own computer. It gets a little more sophisticated when a fraudster organizes botnets and uses them for click fraud. Click farms, which consist of individuals or organizations that try to hire people to click on ads continuously, fall somewhere in the middle of the simple and sophisticated click fraud techniques.

Shuman does point out that: “the impact of invalid clicks at Google is minimal.” Google detects click fraud through simple rules and statistical anomaly detection. Google’s simple rules consist of certain rules they have already defined as what they classify as an invalid click. Since some simple rules can be easily broken, statistical anomaly detection is more effective because it looks at specific activities on websites and compares the expected behavior to the observed behavior. This data gives Google a better understanding of how to detect invalid clicks.

For advertisers wanting to take proactive measures to prevent click fraud, Shuman advises keeping the return on investment (ROI) as the central focus. Research and gather as much data as possible, test everything, and track all results. If you apply these actions and your ROI drops for no reason, you have a good reason to suspect undetected click fraud and should file a claim.

So I guess we have to give credits to those advertisers who pays for the ads. Let us use adsense and earn from it in a fair way. Hectic Capiznon Bloggers 2009 will not patronage this click fraud just to gain earnings from Google yet have not worked on it.