Businesses with a website should know why it’s essential to protect their sites from click fraud. Click frauds can make websites lose money, and are ubiquitous online, especially regarding online ads. This article outlines how click frauds work and how to implement click fraud protection to secure the sites in the future.
- Clicking On The Ads
The most common type of click fraud is when someone clicks on ads to make money. This happens because the click needs to be more accurate. It is done by a bot, which is often a computer program. The bad guys create bots designed to make them pay for clicks that are not real. They do this by having their bots visit the page and then click through on ads or other links.
- Using Bots To Imitate Real Users
Bots to imitate real users. They can generate fake clicks, traffic, leads, and sales. Twitch was accused of using bots to increase traffic and make more money a few months ago. The numbers were staggering: More than half of their views were generated by bots.
- Changing the IP addresses
IP addresses are the unique identifiers for every computer connected to the internet. They are used to identify users and help determine their location, which is why they can help identify click fraud. However, hackers with malicious intentions can also change IP addresses, such as committing click fraud.
To enable click fraud protection on the websites from this activity, users should use one-time pads or tokens as additional forms of authentication when logging into the site or performing specific actions like purchasing products online. One-time pads are encrypted codes that provide two-factor authentication: they require both something customers know (such as a password) and something they have (like an authenticator app). Tokens are physical devices that generate one-time passcodes to grant access to websites when needed most—like when an employee needs access while travelling but cannot get connected via VPN due to poor cellular reception.
Fraudulent Clicks Can Make Businesses Lose Money
Click fraud is a type of cybercrime that involves a hacker or group of hackers gaining access to a website and generating fake clicks. This can be done by either infiltrating the site or purchasing ad space from the business, which they then use to generate fraudulent clicks. In Australia, click fraud costs advertisers, in the country, about a whopping 48 million dollars every year. It may not be much for big businesses, but the small businesses that are the cornerstone of Australia’s economy will surely suffer.
Unscrupulous web admins may also buy traffic from various online services that offer free views in exchange for promotional links on the page. Still, instead of visiting the page advertised, they leave immediately after visiting the original website. This means that while it looks like they are clicking on the link provided by the business (thus giving credibility to whatever product or service they were trying to promote), their intention was only ever to generate revenue through their advertisements.
Suppose someone discovers this is happening with any frequency on their site or pages within their network. In that case, they may become concerned about losing money due to click fraud or damaging their reputation among advertisers who view such behaviour as unethical.
