BotProof Your Ads From Click-Fraud
Earlier last month, Forbes.com posted an article describing yet more fraudulent attacks on display ads by bots. This variant on click-fraud masks itself as human activity by only clicking on ads based on where the user has already been. For instance, the bot tracks which websites you visit, and then if an ad subsequently appears for one of those sites, the bot will surreptitiously click on the ad.
Why should you care? If you are a publisher, you are probably aware that you sometimes get paid based on the number of times your site visitors click on the ads on your site (”Pay Per Click” or PPC). It’s the advertisers that are actually paying for that click — and it’s their expectation that every click they pay for should be legitimate. Of course click-fraud means that many of these clicks are not. Fraudulent activity drives up costs for advertisers and drives down the available pool of money to pay to legitimate publishers.
Why is it done? Easy money, of course. Below is a sampling of two types of fraudsters:
Nefarious publishers may host banner ads on their website and then click on the ads themselves with the sole intent of garnering PPC revenue. Those site owners clicking on the ads have no intent on conducting legitimate transactions with the advertiser.
Another common motive is competition: competitor-A will click on as many of competitor-B’s ads as possible to deplete competitor-B’s marketing budget. Once depleted, legitimate users will only see competitor-A’s ad.
How bad is it? According to the Click Forensics, roughly 15% of all clicks are fraudulent — or over three quarters of a billion dollars per year!
Why do we at BotProof bring this up? With the same technology that is used to make our CAPTCHAs bot-proof, we can make ads click-fraud proof.
For instance, check out this mock up of an ad (here). Bots can neither read (nor click on) those things they can’t see — and in this case both the CAPTCHA code and the ad are protected within our animation scheme. Thus it doesn’t matter where you’ve been, what malware you’ve picked up along the way — your PC won’t be involved in any click-fraud on BotProof’s ads. And advertisers utilizing our platform won’t be wasting money due to automated click-fraud activities.
Give our sales team a call if you want to learn more!