Pay-Per-Click Fraud Costing Top Tech Firms Millions

Share post:

PPC Shield, a click fraud prevention company, recently published the results of a study showing that the largest companies in the U.S. have lost a total of $717 million dollars to abuse of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising fraud.

PPC click fraud refers to the repeated clicking of a banner advertisement on a website with the aim of exhausting an advertising budget or artificially padding ad revenue. Click fraud is malicious and has a negative impact on both ad networks and advertisers.

PPC Shield examined Google’s advertising network and the consumer-oriented websites of Fortune 500 companies to calculate the estimated total cost of their PPC activities over the past year.

Google, the largest donor, invested more than $680 million, leading to a potential loss of way above $95 million. Dell Technologies posted a projected loss of $73 million, while Amazon lists $48 million.

Gartner Senior Research Director Jonathan Care said that companies are not the main targets of PPC scammers because the attack is directed at the pay-per-click system itself. “The target is actually the ad network that provides the ad; in many cases a click fraudster sets up his own “victim” site and self-click,” Care notes.

That may come as a relief to anyone who only hosts ads but ad networks and companies that pay per click for their ads should still remain vigilant to protect their reputation, Care said.

Care mentions that the only good way to combat click fraud is to introduce an identity system that focuses on devices and behaviour to detect anomalies. “This would allow undesirable participants to be identified and therefore excluded from any revenue payments,” Care said.

PPC Shield said there are three things to look out for when reviewing your PPC advertising campaigns: an unusually high click-through rate, lower retention and shorter bounce times than expected, and a sudden drop in ROI.

For more information, you may view the original story from TechRepublic.

Featured Tech Jobs

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Related articles

Cyber Security Today, March 27, 2024 – A botnet exploits old routers, a new malware loader discovered, and more warnings about downloading code from...

This episode reports on a new network of 40,000 infected small and home office routers and other devices that are part of a criminal botnet

Cyber Security Today, March 25, 2024 – A suspected China threat actor going after unpatched F5 and ScreenConnet installations

This episode reports on a new campaign stealing email passwords ,the latest data breaches

A hacker’s view of the civic infrastructure: Hashtag Trending, the Weekend Edition for March 23rd, 2024

What does the civic infrastructure look like through the eyes of a hacker? The legendary general Sun Tzu in the Art of War said that in order to defeat your enemy, you must first understand your enemy. How do you do this? He said, “to know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” If we

Cyber Security Today, Week in Review for week ending Friday, March 22, 2024

This episode features discussion on lessons learned from the ransomware attack on the British Library, advice for managing expectations of IT/security teams, why firms are leaving Google Firebase unprotecte

Become a member

New, Relevant Tech Stories. Our article selection is done by industry professionals. Our writers summarize them to give you the key takeaways