Click fraud

As click fraud refers to a type of Internet fraud that aims primarily coated on per click banner ads (see Pay per Click ). Click fraudsters can do manually or with the aid of programs. This commercial advertising spaces are clicked or those clicks simulated to manipulate underlying accounting systems specific.

Motivation

The motivation for click fraud is different and can generally be divided into two types:

• Gain a competitive advantage (mainly by competing advertisers )
• Fraudulent acquisition of services

The following types of competitive advantages are usually intended by click fraudsters:

• Utilizing all of the advertising budget of a competitor and thus deactivating its banners
• Causing additional advertising costs for competitors
• Under affiliates ( " publishers " ): Provoke the exclusion of a competing advertising partner

Shall be used to surreptitiously services, there are usually the following:

• Direct extra earnings, by clicking on your own ads to generate additional revenue.
• Indirect extra earnings, by clicking on ads of a particular topic in order to drive the per -click price up.

After the pay- per-click providers such as Google rigorous action against advertisers who sneak through click fraud services, the main motivation is to be found mainly in competitive advantage.

Countermeasures

Pay- per-click advertising forms depend in principle to an anonymous audience and often have few possibilities of success control. Using the example of Google Adwords success control is only possible if the advertising customer installs ( who pays for the clicks ) to its website such mechanisms. A comparatively good performance review of the click and purchase behavior allow services like Google Analytics, but requires a complete server-side implementation on the website of the advertiser.

Since this mechanism controlling the success of advertisers depends and can not be generally assumed, the pay- per-click providers are mainly empirical methods. Thus, fluctuations in the number of clicks or suspicious click patterns are being sought to (if they occur in a significant number ) to identify invalid clicks relatively accurately. Need to determine individual clicks and sources of these data are compared with the log files of the web server. From the IP data, the Internet service provider such as can Telekom has been clicked the individual connection of the identify. These data, however, i.d.R. be made available only at the request of the public prosecutor in criminal proceedings and also by the Internet service providers usually only stored for a period of 6 months.