How to Deal With Third-Party Click Fraud on Your Website

So, today's the day we talk about click fraud. This is a serious problem for some advertisers and even the host sites themselves though for different reasons entirely. Click fraud is defined as repeatedly clicking on ads to drain money from the advertiser or to generate additional revenue for the site that said ads are hosted on. The activity can run an ad campaign all the way out the front door � the same door that Google's rapping on because the host site often looks guilty of trying to bolster their revenue in the process.

Naturally, this can lead to the site losing their privilege of displaying ads while the advertiser is drained of their resources to continue advertising. There are clever methods of committing click fraud and equally discouraging reasons for doing so, one being that a competitor might employ bots to tag advertisements in order to reduce the effectiveness of your advertising. It can also put the host website out of ad commission, ensuring that you never advertise with them again.

Coming as someone who used to own a blog where I hosted AdWords, I have to say that I know the pain myself but never did pursue a means of recourse. However, you may be a little more persistent, and the question has been raised as to what can be done to counteract click fraud. Common inquiries investigate the possibility of third-party services that implement bots or other forms of software that observe ad clicks on your site and report what's causing it, the intervals and so on. Services like this do exist, but they're a little on the obscure end of the spectrum.

Although you can always try to prove to Google that you, the advertiser, are a victim of click fraud to claim a refund, some users have reported success with SaaS solutions such as PPC Protect, ClickCease and Click Forensics, all of which are designed specifically to identify and stop click fraud in its tracks. If you're hosting the website itself and interested in protecting your advertisers as well as your own ad revenue, you may also consider looking into these services for your own benefit.