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Pay Per Click marketing or PPC is a form of Internet promotion that is used on web sites (such as blogs for instance) as well as search engines and advertising networks. Advertisers post ad content with a number of such web hosts and the host is remunerated only if and when their ad is clicked. The words “pay per click” literally means what it states: the promoter pays every time a visitor clicks on the ad.

Google, Yahoo! and all the added PPC companies substantial and small are at the moment sucking up millions or even billions of dollars in ad revenue based partially on the belief that clicks are a dependable, quantifiable assessment of consumer interest. But with so much cash up for grabs the Pay Per Click marketing arena has not unsurprisingly attracted armies of scam artists whose tricks have the capability to honestly erode consumer confidence.

Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a actual customer of a internet browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having genuine interest in the target product of the ad’s link. Despite the fact that it is hard to police and keep under control, some search engines have created automated systems that try to shield against these practices with varying degrees of effectiveness, but still the most highly developed of them are not infallible.

Further confusing the circumstances is the fact that the advertisers themselves gain financially from such fraud. The biggest networks fulfill two positions, as Pay Per Click providers and as publishers themselves (via their search engines), which can create conflicts of interest. For case in point, whereas a Pay Per Click network will lose money to click fraud when it makes payment to a publisher, it more than makes up for it when it collects money from an advertiser, so indirectly, the Pay Per Click Network profits from click fraud.

Click fraud can be something as rudimentary as creating a trivial Web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to produce revenue. Often the amount of clicks and their value is so trivial that the fraud goes unnoticed. Larger-sized frauds entail running scripts which which try to make it look like a human clicking on advertisements in web pages on a widespread scale.

Another source of click fraud is what are known as non-contracting parties, these parties are not part of any pay-per-click agreement.

Some examples of non-contracting parties are:

Marketing competitors – By knowingly clicking on their competitors ads (by this means they are forcing them to pay for worthless clicks) they can weaken them or even put them out of business, even if they aren’t profiting directly from this type of click fraud.

Publishing Competitors – Publishers may endeavor to frame their competitors by making it appear as if they are clicking on their own ads, with their end game being that the advertising network terminates their account.

Malice – Like the types of individuals who intentionally exploit and then email computer viruses, some will take part in click fraud not for monetary gain simply to make a publisher and/or advertiser look bad for which ever reason.

Friendship – Sometimes when the friends and/or family of publishers find out that their friend’s business makes money when their ads are clicked on, they may possibly elect to do this themselves, thinking that they are helping out. If they overdo it however, they can do more harm than good when the publisher is accused of being involved with click fraud and has their account closed.

While advertising networks attempt to stop fraud by all such parties it’s often challenging to know which clicks are real and which are not. Usually the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser.

Before you start any online business, make sure you read Ron Cripps excellent reports on Web Promotion and building a viable online business. Free reports and software downloads available.