Ad Click Scam Introduction: What Every Company Should Know
Although a significant proportion of ad fraud cases are committed using robots (bots) that fill out forms and generate fake leads, fraudsters also use other tools.
What is a click farm? How can such "farms" affect your advertising campaigns? And, most importantly, how can you detect clicks and protect your company's bottom line from the negative impact of ad fraud?
What is a click farm?
A click farm is a scam that uses large groups of cheap labor to manually click on online advertisements.
Click farms with hired workers, like their bot-based counterparts, are wreaking havoc in the digital advertising world.
On click farms, people click on advertisements without the intention of buying related products or services.
They simply visit sites and increase the number of useless ad impressions.
Sometimes click farms can also use bots to fill out forms with fake information, creating fake leads. Such activities can be a real nightmare for online advertisers who need reliable leads.
Reasons why click farms are used by scammers
Clients of click farms can use them for different purposes. Below are the reasons why scammers use click farms.
1. Carrying out attacks on competitors
Sometimes click farms are used to sabotage competitors' digital advertising campaigns. For a price, click farm workers view advertisements in an attempt to eat up the budget of an advertiser competing with the click farm client. As soon as the competitor's funds run dry, the click farm client has an increased chance of showing their ads to users.
This technique is often used in pay-per-click ( PPC ) campaigns to quickly drain the target company's advertising budget. "Farmers" after contacting them by a scammer simply begin to repeatedly click on a competitor's display ad placed in Google search results, until they ruin the competitor's entire advertising budget.
These PPC ad scams allow scammers to place their ads almost seamlessly, even if they are targeting extremely expensive keywords.
2. Earning ad revenue and fake social media profiles
Click farms are also used directly for profit. Some scammers create sites purely for advertising purposes, using networks like Google to sell ad space. Once a regular, "respectable" ad is placed on a page, the click farm owner gives his employees the task of interacting with that ad, which in turn allows him to profit from it.
In recent years, the antics of click farms have also taken over social media, as can be seen in the case of click-through ads using fake Facebook profiles. Facebook click farms can generate a lot of likes, but they can also reduce user engagement rates for your products or services, and can harm your Facebook business page in the long run.
Search for "click farm facebook" and you'll find plenty of Facebook click farm stories, tips on avoiding click farms, and more about fake clicks.
Instead of clicks, many farms now sell profiles, users, or accounts. Since these accounts are created by real users and often look real, they can successfully pass security filters on social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
3. Concealment of fraud
One of the reasons scammers use click farms is that it's very difficult to detect scammers ' activities. Unlike the actions of bots, human behavior is more flexible and less predictable. Therefore, it is much more difficult for simple tools designed to protect against clicks to accurately identify and stop the activities of click farms.
When click-through first appeared, platforms like Google and Yahoo were quick to set up filters to combat automatic clicks. But these filters weren't good at dealing with fake clicks that looked like they were coming from real site visitors.
In this way, click farms allowed fraudsters to bypass basic click prevention measures and continue to illegally earn ad revenue.
Click-through ads and social media
Introduced on Facebook in 2009, the Like button quickly became a standard social media feature, with variations of it appearing on Instagram and Twitter.
Initially it was intended to show an emotional response - you put a mark that you liked the published content, that is, "liked", or, in other words, approved it. In 2010, the "Like" button replaced the "Become a Fan" feature on Facebook Pages. The developers took this step to make the whole site more uniform.
Now likes are called the currency of social networks. Marketers and advertisers often use them to measure brand popularity and user activity. However, when it comes to likes, quantity is not always better than quality.
In the previous section, we briefly talked about how some scammers use click farms to artificially inflate their social media profiles - by clicking on the "Like" button on Facebook and other social media platforms, they give the impression that they have more fans than exist.
Let's delve into the problem of fake likes on social media and how click farms promote their fraudulent clients there.
The Problem of Fake Likes/Pluses and Ad Audience Engagement
Facebook and other social media sites often use likes, likes (positive votes), and other user activity data to gauge the popularity of a post. This popularity, in turn, affects how the post is presented to other users and which ads (if any) are displayed.
High user engagement rates tell social media platform providers that the page is genuine or authoritative in some way, and this makes the post more likely to be shared among users.
For example, if thousands or hundreds of thousands of people click on the Like button below a Facebook post and then write thousands of comments, that post can be recommended to more people in their feeds.
However, if your post gets nothing more than likes and no one leaves comments, this can lower your audience engagement rate and reduce the chances that your post will be recommended to other users.
Unfortunately if you work with a scammer who uses click farms to artificially increase user activity, the brand connoisseurs he brings to you will most likely turn out to just click farm employees: they will only view your posts and like them, and then quickly go about your business.
One of the main problems with getting fake likes from a fraudulent click farm is that such likes distort your marketing data. A Like button is a key tool for building user profiles.
Facebook can map a person's demographic and psychographic information based on which pages and posts they like. This is an important resource as you can easily explore your audience statistics.
However if half of the audience is based on fake likes, this data will not be accurate. This means that Facebook and other platforms may be trying to show your content to the wrong audience.
While buying likes is not officially prohibited, this practice is against Facebook's terms of use. The platform stated fake likes, emphasizing that it will "aggressively pursue unscrupulous users behind fake likes because the companies and people using [they're] platform want real social connections and results."
How easy is it to create fake profiles for click farms?
To like, even a scammer needs a social media to account that they can use for their purposes. This means that he needs to provide data such as name, address, email address, phone number, and date of birth.
It can be assumed that it will be difficult for a fraudster to overcome this obstacle, but in reality, this is not the case. Creating an account on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or other social media is very easy.
Fraudsters often have access to a huge database of data about real users. They either stole this data themselves or bought it from cybercriminals in the “dark” segment of the World Wide Web. They can simply copy the data from such a spreadsheet, paste it into the input fields, and edit the email address - that's the whole process.
With over seven billion people living on the planet, it's not unusual for Facebook and other social platforms to have a few duplicate names or even addresses.
You can even create a second Facebook profile yourself relatively easily using the same information, including your name, address, and phone number—you only need to change your email address.
You will receive an SMS message with the following content:
- You may receive a notification that the data on your main account has been changed or deleted because it was used and verified on another account, but the second account will still be created.
- Thus, creating fake Facebook accounts is very easy - there is nothing stopping scammers from simply creating a million profiles of, for example, John Smith with slightly modified information using free Google mailboxes. Fraudsters and their click farms take full advantage of these shortcomings for their purposes.
How click farms help scammers get ahead
Doug Bock Clark's research for the New Republic explores the underground world of click farms. While visiting a Philippine "account farm", Clark observed how fake users were created for commercial purposes.
The farm worker starts creating a fake user using readily available name generators. Some generators only return the first and last name, but others go further, generating randomly generated information such as mailing addresses and birthdays. The farm worker then creates a one-time email account for the "user".
The next step is to register a new Facebook user. This "user" has a name and an email address, but Facebook also asks for a mobile phone number to verify the data. Don't worry, the farm worker already knows what to do. A new SIM card in some old mobile phones will solve this problem.
Facebook sends an SMS message with a code, the employee enters it, and now a new "verified" user has joined the social network, joining the ranks of approximately 81,000,000 fake users. Farm owners can then sell the "user" in exchange for likes and following other users.
We already know that verification based on a code from an SMS message is easy to pass. But Facebook has other measures in place to weed out fake accounts. To determine the "humanity" of profiles, the social network uses an algorithm that is not disclosed.
However, depending on the standards for creating account farms, fake user profiles usually pass verification. The more convincing the profile looks, that is, the more information is filled in, the less likely it is that Facebook considers it fake.
It doesn't help that the account setup and control are handled by real people, not software. Because there are real people behind the scenes, account-related actions, such as liking posts, feel more natural than bots.
How Click-Throughs Can Derail Your Marketing Campaigns - Three Scenarios
Pay-per-click advertising is often considered one of the best ways to invest in digital marketing. According to Linchpin SEO, the average cost per lead (CPL) in 2022 for search ads will be $110, audience display ads $38, and for traditional ads (television, radio, and print) $619. In other words, generating leads through online marketing channels is less expensive than traditional advertising.
What's more, Google claims that "companies typically earn an average of two dollars from every dollar spent on Google Ads ." Therefore, the PPC advertising market has grown significantly in recent years. Fortune Business Insights predicts that the PPC ad market will grow from $12.58 billion in 2019 to $28.62 billion by 2027, despite the impact of the COVID -19 pandemic.
And, of course, where there is money, there will be scammers looking for easy money. How does click-through affect your advertising campaigns? Here are some of the effects of click-through ads:
1. Wasted advertising budget
The most obvious impact of click-through ads is the drain on your internet marketing budget. Fraudulent payments can quickly drain your advertising budget without providing a real return on investment as clicks come from fraudulent sources that do not convert to real customers.
2. Distorted data on marketing results
When a company develops advertising campaigns, the results of previous campaigns are usually used to form their basis. But what happens when data from previous campaigns turn out to be wrong?
When you try to apply erroneous data to PPC ads or any other type of ad campaign, you will quickly find that your ads are not reaching the right audience at the right time, the ad messages are ineffective, and the leads you get are not as high quality as you are. expected.
Marketing data corrupted by fraudulent click farm activity can harm your future advertising campaigns if you fail to identify and eliminate such data.
3. Reducing the duration of PPC campaigns
One of the purposes of click-through, when done by an unscrupulous competitor, is that it can shorten the duration of your PPC campaigns. For example, you may have set a daily click limit for your PPC campaign to prevent overspending.
Using a click farm and bots, a scammer can generate hundreds of thousands of clicks on your ads in a matter of minutes, which will result in your pay-per-click ads being removed from Google's SERPs and other platforms. The competitor can then stop the flow of fake clicks for a whole day as their ads start showing up.
Doing so prevents legitimate potential customers from seeing your ad and will cause your ROI to be minimized.
Five tips for detecting and preventing click-through ads
So what can you do to prevent clicks in your current and future ad campaigns? How to stop scammers from cashing in or draining your daily advertising budget? How to ensure a positive ROI?
Here are some guidelines that you can take as a basis:
1. Don't buy social media likes and followers
Artificially winding up likes, followers, friends, and likes on social networks is simply pointless. You will spend money pretending that your brand is more popular on social media than it is, but skewed marketing metrics from purchased followers won't help social media pinpoint your target audience to deliver your content.
Therefore, it is better not to spoil your marketing data and not fall for tempting calls to buy likes and followers.
2. Take the time to target your PPC ads
Strict targeting options for Facebook ad campaigns provide another layer of protection against unwanted clicks. The social network has made it easier than ever to target by parameters such as location, age, gender, and interests. You can even use these options to exclude user groups from the audience of your ads.
If you run a business page on a social network, it is useful to periodically check the list of subscribers for questionable profiles. In the page settings, click "People and other pages" to view a list of your followers. Here you can prevent specific accounts that you consider suspicious from interacting with your content.
This same advice can be applied to other marketing channels as well. Of course, to make targeting as accurate as possible, you need high-quality, clean advertising data, free from the influence of fraudsters.
3. Don't Buy Ad Space From Publishers You Can't Chat With
Unfortunately, not every online advertising publisher or advertising space provider (SSP) can be called honest and open. There are scam companies that specialize in embezzling your money and spinning your ads using click farms to create the appearance of results.
It is not uncommon for some online advertising publishers to create a false image for themselves. If they've already ruined their reputation in the advertising space, they need a front because they've been blacklisted by several sites for delivering poor-quality traffic. So they impersonate another person or company, take your money and run away.
By the time you realize that you are dealing with ad scams, it will be too late - they will disappear along with your money.
When looking for a partner in advertising, you should not only contact him directly and arrange a personal meeting (or at least a telephone conversation or video conference), but also contact other companies that, according to the partner, were his clients to find out if they stayed whether they are satisfied with the cooperation with him. Verifying your advertising partners can be a critical step in preventing ad fraud as it helps you spot the scammer at an early stage.
4. Track the sources of your traffic and clicks
Do you know where your clicks come from? If not, chances are you are an easy target for a click farm. Leads coming from regions where your company does not operate are not leads at all, as they never convert into actual customers.
So, if you work primarily in Cincinnati, Ohio, but all of your clicks come from an IP address registered somewhere in China or Russia, you may be getting clicks from an overseas click farm that works hard for pennies.
Of course, more sophisticated click farms can use virtual private networks ( VPNs ) to hide the source of the clicks. However, if you notice that most of your non-converting traffic is coming from the VPN provider's data center IP address, this could be a clear sign of a scam.
Another problem with doing such a manual check is that it can take a long time for you to look at the IP address information and determine if the corresponding activity looks like fraudulent activity. Because of this, the scammer has a lot of time to get away with the money that you were going to spend on marketing. Simply blacklisting IP addresses is also not an ideal solution, because this way you can block the excess.
Let's say you blacklist an IP address used by a popular VPN service. But what about all the respectable users who can become your customers and use this service to protect their data on the Internet?
5. Use an ad fraud solution
To do away with click-through ads, you need to be able to flag fraudulent clicks as they occur. However, when using manual methods, real-time detection of ad fraud is nearly impossible.
For advertising platforms, being able to detect a fraudulent click in real-time can be a lifesaver, as it allows them to invalidate the click so that it doesn't count towards the platform client's advertising campaign at all.
This feature reduces the risk of chargebacks, complaints, and lawsuits, and will also please advertisers who want to spend more money because they will get quality leads.
