How To Hunt Down Click Fraud - Finding the evidence
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Now, order the results by IP address.
What you are looking for is two things:
First, if you get more than a couple of clicks from the same IP address, you have some potential fraud.
If you get more than a few clicks (ten or so) from IP addresses that are very similar, then you have some potential fraud.
If you're getting a lot of either of those two, then you have some definite fraud.
You see, people that come to your site legitimately from a search engine are searching for something. Because of the nature of pay per click ads, most people that click on them know what they are. They know what kind of site they are visiting.
A legitimate visitor
should be doing more than just jumping to your main site and not going anywhere else. Thus any traffic that enters your site from a pay per click engine that doesn't visit any other pages is automatically suspect. If you get someone (the same IP address) visiting your site more than once or twice and not doing anything or going anywhere on your site except visiting your main page, that is almost certainly fraud, as is any significant number of visits from IP addresses that are very close to each other.
If you want to be real "tricky" about it, you can add in one more feature. Make a frame on your site that is one pixel tall and 100 percent wide. The page that runs in that frame will simply contain a small little javascript that waits 15 seconds, then runs a PHP script which updates the AnotherPage field to "yes."
Someone who is committing click fraud won't be staying around for 15 seconds, so the code won't run. On the other hand, someone who is actually visiting your site will certainly be around at least that long, if not longer. This will help you to further filter out the legitimate traffic from the fraud.
Next: Tools for spotting click fraud >>
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