This blog has been bringing you a series of
posts which cover the basics of click fraud.
This series is continued with an article on click farms.
What is a click farm? Basically a click farm is a loosely couple
group of people who are paid to click on ads.
Click farms are often called pay to surf schemes and can be camouflaged
behind market research, usability test and other nefarious devices to hide the
real reason click farms exist; to make money fraudulently.
To break down how the activity is
accomplished, the click farmer will broadcast a series of keywords or links he
or she wished to be attacked, the farm labourer will then precede to search for
these keywords and click on the ad which is targeted. They will then browse the site, clicking on a
number of links. The farm labourer may even
request newsletters via an e-mail sign up; in short, they act like a real
user. This is repeated many times, the
farm labourer will then receive a micro payment per ad clicked.
Click farms are used by people committing
both Competitor
Click Fraud and Publisher
Click Fraud. The publisher, to
generate revenue, the competitor to remove competition for keywords and get
clicks at a reduced cost.
As mentioned, click farms generate traffic
which resembles the profile of a real visitor this makes it very hard for the
search engine’s invalid click filters to spot this type of activity. How do you develop a filter to spot invalid
activity which looks exactly like the traffic which generates conversions?
Click farms are loosely coupled groups of
people usually working under the banner of a get rich quick, pay while you surf
scheme. The out payments (if they are
ever made) are usually very low.
Increasingly people in the developing world are used to provide the farm
labour where a few cents per click multiplied over a days work can accumulate
to a decent amount of money.
A click farm is made profitable via some
simple rules of economics. In the case of publisher click fraud, as long as the
out payment from the ad provider is more than the cost per click from a farm labourers,
there is money to be made, multiply this up by a number of labourers and there
is big money to be made.
The keyword competitors make click farm
fraud viable in less tangible method.
High value items costing thousands of dollars make a few hundred dollars
of click farm time viable. The illicit
clicking can then be factored into the cost of client acquisition so a profit
can be realised.
Click farms
represent a real threat to your campaigns, geo-targeting your ads outside of
developing countries which present a high risk of click farm activity is one
solution along with the click farm detection functionality of Click Forensics.
The next article
in this series will discuss what the search engines are doing about click
fraud.
Other posts
in the series:
Neil Matthews is an independent click
quality consultant; details of his work can be seen at www.clickqualityconsultant.com