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Click fraud is, unfortunately, part of advertising online. Major players like Google, MSN and Yahoo! take great pains to help advertisers prevent it. If you’re a pay per click marketer and you suspect click fraud, following are some actions you can take:

Identify the source: There are primarily three culprits when it comes to click fraud. They are listed below.

3 Types of Click Fraud Culprits

Your Competitors: By draining your account as quickly as possible, you are less competition for them. Except in the case of Google, this actually gives you a higher ranking (after all, if you’re getting a lot of clicks, your product must be good/popular, right? Google rewards this). While it may suck for your bank account, in the end it helps you.

Affiliates: Google AdSense affiliates make money every time someone clicks, so some are unscrupulous enough to click (or get someone else to click). 

Traffic Thieves: These are probably the most insidious of the bunch because it’s so hard to identify them. They can be a company that sells traffic to other sites, or an individual who is stealing traffic from you because they sell a similar product, or another type. 

4 Ways to Combat Click Fraud

Track Your Traffic: Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vital to preventing click fraud. You’ll have to provide this to Google anyway if you suspect it, so make it a habit to track it. You can find this out by looking at your web log referrer reports, or by using various tracking tools on the market.

Report Suspicious Activity to Google: Gather all of your evidence, eg, logs of the source of your traffic, normal activity report compared to a suspicious one (comparison click charts), region traffic is coming from, spike dates, etc. Give them everything you think they may need to do a proper, thorough investigation.

Contact the ISP. If the suspected click fraud is coming from an identifiable ISP, contact them to let them know. Do it in writing (email) and by phone.  If this doesn’t work, you can always resort to the following . . .

Retain an Attorney: They will be able to help you, for example, get a court order to release the name attached to the ISP from which the suspected click fraud originated, as well as several other options.

While this may not be cheap, it can literally cost you less if you spend thousands on pay per click marketing.