Search marketing consultancy warns on click fraud

by Staff Revolution UK 11-Jan-07, 08:00

LONDON - Click fraud continues to strike marketers despite the complicated filtering systems used by search engines to combat it, according to pay-per-click consultancy Top Position.

Top Position has secured a £1,000 refund for a client that fell victim to click fraud while advertising on a major search platform.

Click fraud occurs where users click on an ad repeatedly just to make the advertiser pay for the click and deplete the advertiser's daily budget so the advert reaches as few real consumers as possible.

Click fraud is a growing phenomenon driven by the low-cost employment of workers in countries such as China and India who are hired to click on text ads. It can also be undertaken by robots programmed to click on the PPC advert.

Daniel Jupp, managing director of Top Postion, said: "Although the three major search platforms have made great strides forward in their battle to contain the problem of click fraud, pay-per-click advertisers can still find themselves with a depleted budget and no real clicks.

"Monitoring for wasted clicks and analysing advert click-through rates form a routine part of Top Postion's account management service. We have a number of systems in place to detect and investigate suspected click fraud activity before it becomes a problem for the advertiser."

Both Google and Yahoo! employ complicated filtering systems that are designed to weed out suspect clicks before the account is charged.

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