We all know that the prospect of someone hacking your computer is bad news, but although most of us will quite rightly rush to check that our bank account hasn’t been drained of cash or our passwords haven’t been compromised, there is another issue that doesn’t grab the headlines, but has wider implications, namely the problem of click fraud.
If you run a business and are a regular user of click-through advertising as part of your marketing budget, there is the distinct possibility that a percentage of your advertising budget is being consumed by bots and not genuine customers.
Malware has been created that just has one primary goal, which is to click on online ads, with some estimates suggesting that as much as a third of all digital ad spending is wasted in this way.
This infographic, looks at all the relevant aspects of click fraud and poses the question of whether bots are eating your advertising budget.
Malware and other nefarious activities are potentially costing you money on a daily basis, as your highly targeted clicks that you have paid good money for, might actually be coming from bots or even low-paid workers manually going through pages and clicking on ads.
Take a look at the various fraud techniques being used to literally steal some of your advertising budget away, as you obviously derive no benefit yourself from your marketing efforts when the clicks are not real and genuine customers.
Click fraud is believed to have cost marketers over $11 billion in 2014 alone, and that was up over 20% from 2013, so the next set of figures could be even more alarming, which is why it makes sense to know how the fraud happens and what you can do to reduce your risk of being exposed to click fraud.
