Advertlets: Your Questions On Click Fraud Answered

Q: What is click fraud?
A: Click fraud is an internet crime that occurs in per per click advertising. It consists of clicks which are not genuine, which are unfair to the advertiser. This consists of clicks which happen for reasons other than an valid user having an genuine interest to visit a website to be informed or check out products and services offered. It also consists of invalid clicks that are generated by automated scripts or computer programs.

Q: Recently, there has been a publisher in the network who has accused Advertlets of unfairly withholding earnings. Is that person innocent or guilty of click fraud?

A: We are releasing details to support our unjustly accused position, please see the graph below. In this case, we are very confident that this publisher has been engaging in click fraud. The traffic & earning profile for this account has been extremely irregular, as you will notice from the graph below:

In particular, earning RM33.20 in Cost Per Click advertising in one day (04th October) for a blog that averages less than 30 unique impressions a day,is quite unrealistic. You wil note also that the majority of clicks per day are very irregular compared to the rest of the chart. Most importantly, the majority of clicks were confirmed to originiate from the publisher in question.

We do not take pleasure in banning accounts such as these, however, we have to safeguard the interests of our advertisers as well as other bloggers. We have attempted to contact the publisher in question to clarify, however the publisher in question has not been cooperative in answering our questions, and shortly after the account was suspended for click fraud, the publisher removed phone number & address contact details from our database.

Q: Can I click on my own ads?
A: No. Deliberate clicks on an ad to increase profits can result in termination of your accout.

Q: Can I ask visitors to click on my ads?
A: No. Please do not encourage visitors to click the ads by placing wordings such as “please click!” or “check out our sponsor”. You may face immediate account termination if we find that you are doing so.

Someone else has been clicking on my ads a lot to sabotage my earnings by clicking repeatedly on my ads
Please let us know if you believe someone is trying to do so, and we will send you a list of questions to help us determine the problem.

How does your click fraud system work?
We use a combination of the following: duplicate click detection, automated robot detection, IP address, geolocation, pattern recognition, filtering technology, as well as human intervention. The system details and inner workings are confidential and cannot be disclosed for security reasons and to prevent abuse. However, if needed, we are prepared to release details of our server logs for forensic analysis of server log files to third parties or a court of law for verification.

We hope this answers your questions, thanks. Please play nice, and fair, for us to make this work for everyone’s benefit. Cheers!