What is Click Fraud?

Technology is moving so fast that the legal community cannot keep up with the ever changing requirements of the technological field. One of the newest and most prominent problems to hit the legal community is that of Click Fraud in the technical community. Let’s talk a little about what exactly pay per click advertising is, and then we’ll discuss why click fraud has become such a problem, both for advertisers, consumers, and the legal field.

Advertising has probably been around since the time of the cave man. I can see it now, the wheel drawn on the side of all the caves with an arrow pointing to Fut’s Hut to trade your bear pelts for the new wheel technology. And just imagine when fire was ‘invented’! It’s a fact of life, we live with advertising. It’s as important as it is annoying at time, but to the internet marketer, advertising is crucial.

Word of mouth will only get you so far, and paying for rotating banner ads that aren’t targeted to anyone is a waste of money. So what is the internet marketer to do? Along comes something known as Pay Per Click advertising. This is an ingenious little concept that in theory is a really good idea.

Here’s how it works. You create a short ad and then select the keywords for your ad. You bid on these keywords, the more popular ones will end up costing you more money, and then you decide what your keyword and key phrase list is for that ad. Then you set the ad to go live. Now, when people surf the internet, use search engines, or view sites using this type of pay per click advertising, your ad will display on pages or searches that used the same keywords you selected in your advertising set up.