Click fraud is a term that is still not very well known in the world of digital marketing. In certain countries, it is beginning to transition into something quite common, because it is a problem that grows more and more each day. But, while this happens in the United States, in the rest of the world, it still seems like this problem is not very well known.
Click fraud is a situation that arises when competitors use programming techniques to sabotage your campaigns. This can also be done by humans: you tell all your staff to search for keywords and click on your competitors’ ads so they lose money and to train the algorithm so that the ad is shown to people who are actually good targets. You can also do it programmatically, and even as you add layers of security, it just gets more and more advanced.
From Bots to Botnets: How Click Fraud Evolved
At first, it was only bots making the clicks from a single server, and then botnets appeared, which are real devices of human beings that were at some point infected on their phone or computer. These devices are being controlled from a central control, which gives instructions to all these devices in a certain country, state, or region, so they click on a specific brand or a specific ad. And these are much harder to detect because they are not using VPNs or any tool that can be detected; instead, they appear as humans. And what happens is that they use the real person’s information on the device, and when you talk to the person, they say they never clicked on that ad, and in fact, it’s true—what clicked was a program they don’t even know is installed on their device.
The Rise of Click Farms
There are also what are called click farms, and they are becoming more and more advanced. At first, it was many phones in a grid, where people were controlling them; then centralized controls appeared, where all these phones were controlled from a master control. After that, the screens of all these phones disappeared, and only the motherboard of these phones remained with the SIM. Now, there are even more simplified motherboards, where you have, for example, many WhatsApp accounts on a motherboard the size of a phone, and they are used for this purpose. They are used a lot during elections; they are also used, for example, by people who place ads on their blogs and earn money from these ads, so they begin to put robots to click as a way to increase their earnings. And in elections, it is a way to influence the narrative and public opinion, either by sabotaging or by positively or negatively commenting on opposing candidates’ posts.
When Election Season Ends, Businesses Become the Target
The problem is that, when elections finish, these companies that are dedicated to this, which is when they have their biggest contracts, they have no work, and like any company, they have to look for ways to make money between one election and the next. And what they start doing is they begin to sell these services directly to companies or online, and what ends up happening is that, before, competing in marketing was about the quality of your skill, and more and more, we are moving towards a competition where it is about how you evade these types of attacks.
Why Big Tech Won’t Fix It
Unfortunately, for companies like TikTok, Reddit, Google, and Meta, click fraud is actually not a priority issue, because for them it represents roughly 20% of their annual revenue. So, eliminating it would mean a fairly large loss. And what they end up doing is creating very weak and inefficient solutions, with the aim that, in reality, the problem is not truly fixed. This is creating a competition where it is no longer about the value proposition, but about techniques for evading these attacks. This ends up being quite damaging, because now the brands that will have the greatest influence in the world will not be because they have a good value proposition or a great marketing team, but because they have a team of hackers or highly developed hacker companies that have the ability to sabotage other businesses.
Another big problem is that often these companies exist in countries where there are still no regulations on these types of practices. So, when you want to defend yourself as the company that was attacked, it is in a place that is not sanctioned, and you cannot do anything legally. And, especially for small and medium-sized companies that are competing with very low paid media budgets, it is very easy to destroy and eliminate the company with very little budget.
How The Wow Agency Protects Your Campaigns
We, at The Wow Agency, perfectly combine branding with performance and technology in all of our campaigns. The strategy to eliminate click fraud is considered from the very beginning. It is not a problem that we are unaware of or that surprises us when it happens; instead, from the start, we have a structure of different layers of security that we use so that the effect is minimal or even null for our clients. Moreover, as time goes by, each competitor increasingly understands where this source of fake clicks is coming from, and in this way, we can block them better and better, sometimes even discovering who the people are that are attacking us.