There are numerous types of click frauds. Most common would be automated bots, click farms, pay-to-click and manual clicks. These clicks result in huge expenditures for advertisers without any results.
Some of the most common click frauds are listed below:
Manual Clicks:
A publisher clicks on advertisements on his own website or his network of websites yielding him easy quick revenue. This method is however, easily traceable by search engine automated PPC algorithms. Since mostly these fraudsters use the same IP address or a set of IP addresses, their publishing account is closed and the pay out is put on hold.
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Competitive Clicks:
A user clicks on the advertisement of his competitor just to increase competitor’s expenditure and close their advertising campaign faster. The user repeatedly clicks on competitor advertisements which results in removal of advertisements for the day due to budget restrictions by competitor or the entire closure of advertising campaign as it did not yield any result.
Contextual Clicks:
These types of clicks generally do not drive targeted traffic. The pages are designed to generate more clicks and each time a user clicks on a listing on the website, the website gets paid. The user mostly is not aware that the link they clicked was actually an advertisement. These clicks are mostly detected only if a visitor complains to the advertising company.
Pay-to-Click
These types of networks were largely popular couple of years back. However, they have been considerably reduced and search engines keep a watch on such programs. One gets paid just by clicking on the advertisements on the list of websites the click fraud company provides. The members of these companies are usually publishers.
Automated Clicks:
Software’s or bots are created which automatically crawl the list of sites programmed into it or follows links to click on advertisements. Also, some bots can infect a computer and start clicking on advertisements even without the knowledge of the computer user. These types of bots are also commonly detected by search engines by tracking the nature of browser and clicks.