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Click fraud is a hot topic for both 2021 and 2022.
Any member of any affiliate program who promotes offers through contextual advertising services has experienced click fraud at least once. That is what this type of scam is called.
For some, clickfraud ended in a fatal drain on the advertising budget, while others were more fortunate.
This article is an attempt to find answers to the questions: is it possible to prevent fraud and protect yourself from click fraud? What needs to be done to protect yourself and save not only your money, but also your nerves? We understand.
The dark side of online advertising
Today, any commercial on TV or placing a banner somewhere on a street billboard is perceived as a kind of atavism. This approach is typical for large, hulking brands with billions in advertising budgets, although they are also mostly represented in the advertising space on the Internet.
Young companies and startups have long opted for online advertising. And if we talk about affiliate programs, then in a nightmare you will not see any affiliate advertising its offers on TV or on the radio, for example.
For online advertising, there are convenient online platforms, high-quality analytics tools, and the ability to receive real-time statistics.
For example, in the Alanbase online service, you can not only receive analytics “here and now”, but also configure its parameters exactly for your offer. This allows our customers to always have up-to-date objective data at their disposal.
Internet advertising also allows users to quickly adjust running advertising campaigns to prevent budget drain on ineffective advertising channels.
The benefits are obvious, but there is also a dark side – click fraud. Especially if contextual advertising services are selected as advertising sources.
If CPA networks mainly use the “pay per action” (CPA) model, then many webmasters attract traffic for the affiliate programs they participate in using the “pay per click” model. They are the ones most affected by click fraud.
Companies that advertise on partner sites by placing banners with pay per click (transfer) also suffer from click fraud.
The advertiser may also face an unscrupulous webmaster. The scheme of click fraud in this case looks like this: the webmaster sends fake clicks to the banner in order to increase his reward for placing ads, and the advertiser simply drains the budget into nothing.
Is it possible to prevent deception in this area, especially when no one is potentially safe from it, neither in USA, nor in UK, nor in the EU countries, and indeed in the entire global world of online advertising?
How to prevent fraud and protect yourself from click fraud
The bad news is that there is no way to 100% prevent fraud and click fraud.
The good news is that if you are aware of the problem and use the right online tools in your daily life to protect against advertising budget drain, you will be able to detect the threat in a timely manner and minimize it if you encounter click fraud.
At the same time, according to WFA forecasts, ad and click fraud will grow in the coming years, and in 2025, attackers will steal about $50 billion from bona fide advertisers, affiliate program owners, and webmasters who place contextual advertising.
The scam war is only gaining momentum, so it’s worth thinking about protection measures right now if you haven’t already done so.
An overview of services that can prevent fraud and click fraud
To prevent click fraud, there are anti-fraud services. Below you will find a brief overview of the most popular antifraud services. Using any of them, you can already protect yourself from budget drain and prevent click fraud.
By the way, large contextual advertising networks, such as Direct or Adwords, have built-in antifraud systems.
For example, in any advertising campaign in Yandex.Direct, Yandex finds at least 20% of invalid clicks, for which it returns money to the user. True, in order to prevent fraud or unscrupulous swindling of the budget by competitors, more serious protection is needed – autonomous anti-fraud services. More about them.
ClickCease
This standalone click fraud protection software is suitable for those who use contextual advertising services from Google and Bing. The service automatically calculates and blocks fraudulent IP addresses from which fake clicks can be sent to the advertising campaign of the webmaster of a particular affiliate program or to the offers of a particular affiliate program.
The cost of using is $15 per domain.
ClickFrog™
An excellent proven service to protect against click fraud. Ideal for those webmasters who place offers from affiliate programs in teaser networks, where fraud is like snow in winter. Also useful for those who advertise in Google Ads and Direct.
In order to set everything up correctly, you will need minimal knowledge of how your own site works in order to put a piece of code in the right place.
The minimum cost of using the service is 250 rubles per month, but it is better to look at the prices on the official website.
AdTector
The service is considered the “gold” standard to prevent click fraud. According to the developers, AdTector reliably blocks click fraud in 99% of cases, because its algorithms are based on machine learning: every day the service improves itself and its ability to detect suspicious activity and abnormal clicks.
Summary
The war between conscientious affiliate program owners, webmasters and scammers is an endless process, because both sides are forced to come up with new methods of protection and new types of fraud.
It is unlikely that you can prevent click fraud 100%, but you will lose much more if you do not find an online platform with fraud protection that suits you in most respects.
We advise all affiliate program owners and bona fide advertisers to do this as soon as possible if you want to prevent fraudulent clicks and do not want to give fraudsters your money.
