In this digital age, we should be able to grasp a simple understanding of digital marketing and what is it all about. Digital marketing took over the world by storm with big players such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and many more.

These companies created a digital world with rich contents available in the web but with vast amount of content comes a challenge for everybody to get to the top of the page. Racing against all the others to ensure their content is well receive by worldwide audience. Thus, a born in what we all known it as SEO, Search Engine Optimization where contents are properly rectified following search engine guidelines.

Next comes SEM, Search Engine Marketing which people refer to it as Pay-Per-Click advertising. PPC tends to generate largest profits for consumer as these methods help companies who were unable to get ranked on the first page be visible to the world with advertising.

With tremendous demands in PPC, click fraud starts to happen by unorthodox people or machine who aims to sabotage and create disruption in the competitive world.

Click fraud basically affects advertisers as these clicks are being charged to them for every click on their ads. A simple research done in 2017 shows that about 1 in 5 clicks on adverts were fraudulent. These clicks were constantly rising throughout the years.Not only does click fraud drive up advertiser costs, it also affects analytical data which companies and businesses rely upon to make effective marketing and business strategies. Thus, placing a proper foothold in stopping such click fraud is important.

Competitors:

They gain a competitive advantage by wasting on your previous marketing budget and marketing strategy. They disrupt your analytics data easily. These in turn helps them to improve their position ranking when budget is fully exhausted for the day giving them ample chance to appear throughout the day.

Webmasters:

They would be able to earn some income by displaying ads on their web pages. These people create a simple AdSense account and start displaying ads to random strangers not within your target group. They would eventually earn a cut of up to 68% paid by google when a user click on a specific ads. In order to earn decent amount a month, these ads were to be click often and thus such clicks were either done with a bot or scripting or even by webmasters themselves. These fraudulent clicks will generate same profit as genuine clicks but at a faster rate. Such activities were against Google’s term of service but it is still happening around the world.

Discontented Customers:

They try to sabotage a company by wasting their marketing budget. These customers were either unhappy with the service or having some issues with an employee in the company. They would tend to click ads days after days. Such click fraud does not post a huge treat to the company as they will not be able to affect companies’ budget significantly. For such click fraud to happen, a customer or person itself would have to understand how click fraud and pay-per-click works.

Fraud Syndicate:

They earn huge income performing such fraudulent clicks and activities. These syndicate often target big companies and expensive keywords in order to reap bigger rewards for themselves. According to report made, a simple study in 2016 by white ops reported that a Russian click fraud syndicate manage to earn a hefty amount of $3 to $5 million per day.However, such fraud methods were conducted by millions of different group, companies and personnel. There are still proper bot-traps and methodology and technique used to prevent such click fraud activities from happening.