Main sources of fake clicks
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2025 5:52 am
Competitor Fraud
Unethical, this type of fraud aims to increase your competitor's advertising spend (especially on the search network) by causing you to lose as much money as possible. This harms the performance and relevance of your ads.
Revenge
Just like with competitor scams, someone could be clicking on your ads to drain your budget. This could be a former employee, former partner, a dissatisfied customer, among other possibilities.
Bots
A clickbot is a software programmed to click on links on various websites. Lately, they have become quite sophisticated in imitating various actions that a real user would do, such as: mouse movements, variation in time between clicks, among others.
The ultimate goal is to generate the maximum namibia phone number list number of clicks for the reasons mentioned above.
Click farms
Whether they can be set up automatically or by human hands, click farms are hired to generate clicks on specific links.
They usually have a network of people who click or take specific actions and in return, they get paid to do so.
They are not limited to advertising, many companies hire them to increase engagement and followers on a social network, watch videos on YouTube or another website, comment on posts, among other actions.
Botnet
With a very robust structure, the criminals use thousands of IPs, domains and automated bots to create an ad fraud network. The most famous of these was Methbot, whose infrastructure consisted of over 500,000 IPs, 6,000 domains and over 250,000 URLs. Each contained a video ad and used variations of famous domain names to trick users.
Unethical, this type of fraud aims to increase your competitor's advertising spend (especially on the search network) by causing you to lose as much money as possible. This harms the performance and relevance of your ads.
Revenge
Just like with competitor scams, someone could be clicking on your ads to drain your budget. This could be a former employee, former partner, a dissatisfied customer, among other possibilities.
Bots
A clickbot is a software programmed to click on links on various websites. Lately, they have become quite sophisticated in imitating various actions that a real user would do, such as: mouse movements, variation in time between clicks, among others.
The ultimate goal is to generate the maximum namibia phone number list number of clicks for the reasons mentioned above.
Click farms
Whether they can be set up automatically or by human hands, click farms are hired to generate clicks on specific links.
They usually have a network of people who click or take specific actions and in return, they get paid to do so.
They are not limited to advertising, many companies hire them to increase engagement and followers on a social network, watch videos on YouTube or another website, comment on posts, among other actions.
Botnet
With a very robust structure, the criminals use thousands of IPs, domains and automated bots to create an ad fraud network. The most famous of these was Methbot, whose infrastructure consisted of over 500,000 IPs, 6,000 domains and over 250,000 URLs. Each contained a video ad and used variations of famous domain names to trick users.