With the growth of geometry in the popularity of the Internet worldwide, commerce has taken on a whole new dimension. Advertisements placed on websites have always been designed to generate revenue for the site owner - whether they are ads for his products or ads for paid advertisers. When that did not seem to start as expected, search engines came up with the best idea of making the ads relevant to those who use their sites.
That gave life to the habit of advertising “pay per click” or PPC. This has made a lot of money for those who have opened their own sites for such ads. It has grown so much that it has only become an industry in recent years.
Advertising in this way has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. Industry sources say keyword advertising reached nearly half of Yahoo's estimated revenue of $ 3.7 billion in 2005.
How does this work? It's easy. There are two options: results page ads, and ads on other sites.
When keywords are searched using a search engine, the results page will display links to pages that match those words. These links are placed there through a partnership program between the search engine and the advertiser. Every time a visitor clicks a link, the advertiser is charged.
For websites, a second type of interaction program is installed. The search engine places ads on web pages based on the content on that page. When a blog post talks about cars, ads on those posts will focus on a variety of vehicles, builders and dealers. Every time a visitor clicks on ads, the advertiser is charged and the search engine separates this revenue from the site owner.
Ideally, this should please everyone involved. But, look, people are finding ways to change this situation and turn it into their own benefit - to avoid paying advertising fees and making competitors pay more for the inefficient service.
Then comes Fraud
People will find ways to go around the payment system. Some will direct competitors' sites, just to use their own. With these incentives in mind, fraudulent clicks on ads have cost tens of thousands of dollars, and all you have to do is want to ruin the “click-through payment” (PPC) system.
An easy way to do this is to have someone click a competitor's ad multiple times. Nothing comes out of that click-through confusion but your opponent’s big bill.
More complicated than a competitor who clicks a little at a time in various corporate ads. This raises suspicion small enough but still does the job, slowly but surely.
When a company puts a limit on its advertising budget - which is the norm for many - this means that ads will have less exposure time, thus reducing the chances of success from better sources.
This method of click-through fraud is so simple that it can only occur in the least intelligent group. However, some are increasingly inventing things.
There are "bots" that will click and verify that the source IP addresses are diverse and difficult to track. Some of these bots can also generate random IP addresses such as 404 error messages or missing addresses.
Some companies have turned to the development of abusive websites and keywords used by competitors, which is why the ad comes from a site that will not produce hot songs. This helps to reduce the effectiveness of the ads until the site crashes to the latest pages in the search engine and eventually crashes. From this it is a view of "splog" or spam blog. This site creates content taken from popular sites to produce "active" content. This then invites ads on "relevant" sites and helps reduce the effectiveness of those ads.
Yahoo and Partners are meeting
Advertisers feel the pain of this problem. Some even report that they are experiencing 40% of their advertising budget wasted due to fraudulent hackers.
As an act of interest and cooperation, Yahoo! encourage the use of third-party engineers to help reduce this number significantly. When the word "click fraud" is used by Yahoo's search engine, it will generate a list of companies like Authenclick, Click Defend, ClickAssurance, Clicklab, Clickrisk, VeriClix, WhosClickingWho have created click-and-click analytics tools. suspicious activity. .
Equipped with relevant information from these analysts - such as ad campaign name, IP addresses, keywords used in search pages, reference or origin, click location, click number and times, and other important information - the advertiser can then use the information to file a lawsuit against the party onalo. Granted, this may seem a bit confusing with the intricacies of click-through fraud, but it's just the beginning.
Yahoo! it also looks to make the click process more complex, in response. For example, they may limit the payment of ads followed by another action site visitor, e.g. registration page. But this will translate into smaller revenues of related ad sites.
As a result of this campaign, hundreds of people were sued by advertisers in 2005. Some have been punished and some cases are still pending. This makes the situation worse. However, there is still a long way to go before solutions to this problem can be completely solved, if at all possible.
Industry experts are announcing the coming demise of the industry, claiming that new ways of making money through advertising will be available and used instead of existing problems.
But there is still hope. If fraudsters are smart, so are industry workers. In the meantime, advertisers can monitor fraud using any of the tools available. Rest assured that many tools will address these issues in a more efficient way. It may be just a matter of time.
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