Does Your Contract Protect You From Click Fraud?

If your contract calls for payment per click, then you need to determine if your contract properly protects you from click fraud. Click Fraud occurs when a person or program imitates a user by maliciously clicking on competitors’ advertisements. This type of fraud occurs when an advertiser has retained a marketer to send traffic to their product or service site and pays the marketer only when potential customers click on an advertiser’s link. The reason this occurs is because the marketer wants to artificially inflate the number of clicks and thus receive higher revenue. There are two types of click fraud perpetrators: competitors and affiliates. Competitor click fraud occurs when a business's competitor clicks on a Pay-Per-Click ad in order to run up marketing costs on a competitor. This not only damages a company financially, but may also result in a more favorable position for the competitor's ad. Affiliate click fraud is when a marketing agent agrees to host the ad in exchange for payment for each time a potential customer clicks on the ad. The affiliate then uses fraudulent clicks to drive up click fees and its share of that revenue. This type of fraud can be committed manually and through the use of software programs known as bots.