Click Fraud Is Impossible To Police
Tags: advertising, adsense, fraud, google
Published: 2024-05-03 01:42:01

The majority of large advertising networks, such as Google and Adsterra, bill by click and or impression. 

An advertising campaign works as follows. The advertiser creates an advertisement, often an uploaded image with their logo and something appealing about their product. Clicking on this advertisement will lead a prospective customer to their website. They then set a daily budget maximum and indicate how much they are willing to play per click and then launch their advertising campaign.

The advertiser returns the next day to find all of their money up to their budget limit has been spent and sometimes a little more. Yet, often they have no engagement, nothing purchased. How are they to know that any of these clicks were real customers genuinely interested in their product? They really have nothing but trust in the advertising network to ensure them that this fire house of money leading away from their business had potential. Anyone who has tried online advertising is very familiar with this feeling.

Firstly, let's go over how the bad guys that are known to exploit advertising networks work the system. There are criminal organizations that stand up websites for the sole purpose of making advertising revenue through fraudulent clicks. They enroll in an advertising network, build up some trust serving ads but then they start to pay contractors to surf their website and click on advertisements. These contractors obviously have no intent to buy anything, they are paid pennies to click, but they do make money and so does the advertising host and wait for it ..... so does the advertising network. The big loser is of course the advertiser.

Secondly, let's discuss the motivation that ad networks have to police this kind of activity. They make money when this happens so the only motivation they have to prevent it is their reputation. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they do everything they can to prevent it which leads to the third point.

Thirdly, it is super hard to prevent this. Things they can do are to be careful about enrolling websites in their system that aren't legitimate. How impossible is that? Maybe a website has been clean for years but suddenly decides they need more revenue and enrolls in a click network. The only way to detect that would be a suspicious pattern of dramatically increasing revenue. This of course is very subjective, and so easy to make mistakes. I think it is obvious that there is no perfect way to do this. Especially since a very sophisticated click network would consist of bots all over the world and these bots could be organized to gradually increase traffic and clicks on a website.

So the creepy feeling you get when your money goes down the drain and you don't see any increase in business... Trust your feelings.

So what is the solution to this? The solution is to pay for advertising the traditional way, by paying for time. Time on a billboard, time on a television show etc, or time on a website.

This is where [AdsP2p.net](https://adsp2p.net/) comes in, because all advertising is purchased on a monthly basis. There is no pay per click so there is no click fraud. It's just not possible. You know exactly what you are getting for your money, and rest assured the new traffic on your website will be real people with real interest in your product.

Police lights image borrowed from [ledequipped](https://www.ledequipped.com/psychology-behind-red-and-blue-police-lights/)