In mobile marketing, click fraud can be used in multiple ways. One is click injection, where fraudsters detect a real app install and inject a fake click to try to steal attribution credit for it. Fraudsters may also flood ad networks and attribution providers with clicks, hoping to just get lucky and inappropriately capture credit.
Often they do this by monitoring activity on an Android phone via an innocuous app — like a flashlight app or other basic utility.
Singular monitors and prevents all these attacks.
In PPC advertising, both advertisers and publishers can be impacted by click fraud. Investopedia highlights two primary reasons in which click fraud is carried out: to reduce competition from other advertisers or to artificially boost ad revenue from fake clicks.
Reducing competition with click fraud
One common application of click fraud is attempting to steal another advertisers PPC budget and ultimately reduce competition. For example, a click fraud bot may repeatedly click on another advertisers ad and spend their entire daily budget, leaving other advertisers with less competition.
Another example of click fraud for reducing competition is the bot repeatedly clicking on a publisher ads, making it look like the publisher is trying to boost their own revenue. This behaviour may lead the ad network to cut off their relationship with the publisher as they believe the publisher is attempting to generate revenue with click fraud. Ultimately, this would leave other publishers with less competition and more ad revenue available for other sites.
Generating revenue with click fraud
Another common use case of click fraud is for publishers to use bots to click on ads on their own site in an attempt to increase ad revenue. In this case, website owners are trying to make it seem like real users are clicking through the ads on their site as each click would generate the site a small amount of revenue.
Both of these examples of click fraud can be notoriously difficult to detect, although both ad networks and third-party fraud prevention providers like Singular have built cutting-edge technology to identify and remove click fraud.