Click fraud is a pay per click online advertising crime where a person, automated script or computer program imitates a web browser user clicking on an ad. The purpose? To generate a charge per click without having actual interest in the ad, usually in a bid to use up a competitor’s marketing budget.
The overall industry average click fraud rate in Q2 was 12.7%. That’s down from 13.8% for Q1 2009, and from the 16.2% rate reported for Q2 2008 (source: ClickForensics).
Click fraud is strange as it would be so easy to bar IPs from multiple clicks on an ad. It appears to be a scam with search engines.