Click Fraud:

A term relating to PPC  advertisements. Anytime a click on an ad does not occur out of a honest interest in the ad’s offer but out of some other intention one can speak of Click Fraud (except for unintentional, erroneous clicks). The advertiser is left with a bill for clicks which gave him no chance to make a sale in the first place.

There can be various intentions behind fraudulent clicks like the wish to harm a competitor, pure vandalism, AdSense site owners who want to raise their earnings by clicking on the ads on their own site or making their friends click and others.

For PPC publishers like Google , Yahoo! and others Click Fraud is a problem because on one hand they profit from any click on a sponsored ad (after all they are the ones who are paid for the clicks). On the other hand their reputation might suffer if PPC advertising would not prove profitable anymore because of a too high Click Fraud rate and they might lose their PPC income stream completely and advertisers would turn to other ways of promoting their product s. Therefore every honest PPC publisher takes measures against Click Fraud, mainly by not billing the advertiser for clicks which are most probably fraudulent. The exact counter measures are not published in order not to make their circumvention easier. Google for example does not bill their advertisers for multiple clicks from a single IP address within 30 days.

Repeated clicks on AdSense ads which can be traced to the AdSense publisher himself lead to a cancellation of his AdSense account.

[Click is imitative, that means the word is imitating the sound of the action it is supposed to describe;

Fraud comes from Latin fraudem = deceit, injury]

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