Click fraud is a form of bot attack, with click fraud bots instructed to repeatedly click ads, buttons or other hyperlinks on a website to give the illusion that these interactions come from legitimate users. Click fraud is generally carried out on a large scale, involving thousands of false clicks. This leads to skewed analytics, which give website owners a false indication of their site’s performance. The most common example of click fraud is advertising fraud.

Advertising fraud is a form of click fraud which uses bots to affect online ad performance. There are several different forms of ad fraud:

Click hijacking – Redirecting a click from one ad to another, ‘stealing’ clicks and leading to skewed analytics. If your site is a victim of click hijacking, the perpetrator must have compromised your proxy server, ad publisher or your own computer.

Fake app installation – ‘Click farms’ often install apps thousands of times using hacking methods, using bots to perform thousands of fake interactions with any in-app advertisements.

Hidden ads – Adverts being placed in ways that go undetected by authentic users, generally targeting ad networks which pay according to impressions rather than clicks.

Google ads fraud – Ad publishers using bots to click on ads that they own, falsely generating revenue and leading to skewed analytics.

These are the most common forms of bot fraud in digital advertising, though click fraud and data skewing methods continue to evolve. With this in mind, it’s crucial that business owners invest in ad fraud protection to stop ad fraud and click fraud bots.

Over half of all internet traffic is automated, with much of this automated traffic a result of click fraud bots. If you can’t tell the difference between human and bot activity on your site, you are at risk of using skewed analytics to make critical business decisions, which may have a negative effect on your business.