Another article on click fraud at the pay per click engines from DM News. Great article that goes into detail about the different forms of click fraud and the fact that click fraud benefits more people than it hurts.
What is click fraud? Click fraud appears in three (or four) major forms, each with its own technique and desired income. Traditional click fraud, in which fraudsters click on advertisers’ pay-per-click ads with no intention of purchasing the advertised product or service, is mostly conducted by two groups: competitors and network partners/publishers. Competitors click on PPC ads to charge money to rival companies.
Generally, competitor click fraud occurs when a competitor clicks a couple times in a row on another company’s ad. Limited by the sheer determination of virulent competitors, such fraud is damaging only to small businesses in competitive spaces with high PPC costs.
A lawyer in New York with an average bid price of $10 could lose $300 a month from one extra fraudulent click per day. If that lawyer deals in Vioxx or mesothelioma cases, where keyword prices range from $20 to $50, he stands to lose as much as $1,500 from just one instance of click fraud per day!
This is all very true and Ive always been concerned about click fraud, but especially when handling campaigns for very expensive legal keywords, such as vioxx and mesothelioma.
This is all just another great reason to make sure you focus on your ORGANIC search engine listings. Free listings are a lot better then paid listings and while its a good idea to have both sometimes, putting more focus on organic listings is a better move in the long run.