Pay Per Click Fraud

Online marketing is getting more and more complicated now that not only is there spam to worry about with email marketing, but a recent article in the Times of India reports widespread abuse of Pay Per Click campaigns in India. Yes, there are countless people sitting at their computers just clicking ads for a few hours a day. For their efforts, they earn between $.18 and $.25 per click.

And unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to stop it. WebProWorld reports that Google is well aware of fraudulent clicks and has had to pay refunds for them in the past. They expect to continue to pay for such in the future, where the trend may increase.

The moral of all of this is don’t think it can’t happen to you. Start checking your server logs for repeat clicks if you aren’t already! You never know what you’ll find. Over the course of May-June, I noticed that about one third of our site’s traffic from Looksmart was coming from a very small range of IP Addresses that mapped to Argentina and Uruguay. Same pattern – click through then pause/refresh the page then leave.

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