If you run pay-per-click advertising campaigns, such as Google AdWords campaigns, half the clicks you are paying for may be fraudulent! Click fraud has become a big problem that many Internet marketers and pay-per-click search engine companies have to deal with these days. Here is what you need to know about click fraud.

Click fraud is the act of deliberately clicking on pay-per-click search engine ads, for reasons other than visiting a website to make a purchase or to obtain more information. As an Internet Marketer, you have an advertising budget that you must stick to, and you expect to make a certain return on those advertising dollars in order to make a profit. You may not be aware of how deeply click fraud is cutting into the profits that you expect to make.

Often, one company or business owner will click on the ads of competitors. The point is to greatly increase the cost of advertising for the competitor, and to either force the ad owner to reduce the amount of advertising that they do, or to go out of business altogether! Many business owners who run Google AdWord campaigns have a set limit that they are willing to spend each week or each month. When the number of clicks that they get reaches that set amount, they stop the campaign.

Often, a competitor will simply click the ads until the campaign is stopped before starting their own similar campaign. Google and Yahoo Search Marketing have also discovered that many companies in India, Russia, and China actually have employees whose job it is to click on ads of competitors! This is one form of click fraud.

Click fraud may also occur when website publishers click on the ads that appear on their pages to raise their website revenue. Often, because IP numbers can be traced, the website publishers do not click on the ads themselves. Instead, they have friends do so for them, or they work out deals with other website owners to click on each other’s ads. Google and Yahoo Search Marketing try to monitor this, and keep it from happening. Unfortunately, they are seldom successful.

The search engine companies are doing everything that they can to prevent click fraud – but the issue is so complex that there is ultimately no real way to prevent click fraud from happening altogether. However Google and Yahoo Search Marketing do give refunds to advertisers when click fraud occurs – as long as there is proof that it is happening.

You need to learn how to watch for click fraud on your end as well. Don’t depend on the pay-per-click search engines to discover that you are a victim of click fraud. There are several services that you can use to monitor your clicks. These services will provide you with information about your visitors including IP addresses, their geographical location, the keywords that they used to find your site, and the date and time of the visit. These services also detect large numbers of clicks coming from one or more IP addresses, and they can even let you know when an IP address that is suspected of click fraud is clicking to your site! One such service is Who is Clicking Who at: http://www.whosclickingwho.com/ .

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