Click fraud: what merchants can do

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In 2001, the Chase Law Group, a group of attorneys based in California, was spending huge sums on pay-per-click advertising. Because they were competing for traffic in a crowded (and lucrative) niche, they were paying a hefty $3 to $10 per click. The firm's PPC bill was "in the six figures monthly," says Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, the Internet marketing firm that was handling the account.

As Stricchiola supervised the account, she noticed odd traffic patterns. "When we started identifying some anomalies, we had the data to look at to get really granular and say, 'Gosh, what's this traffic about? Why are we seeing these spikes and repeated clicks on these really high priced words, with no conversions?'"

As she dug deeper, her suspicions were confirmed. "We had the data to identify that it was actually a competitor clicking on the ads from multiple locations, as well as some of their colleagues." After presenting Chase's log files to search engines, "We got a significant refund from both Goto and Findwhat," Stricchiola says.

It was one of the first documented cases of click fraud, which is the act of clicking on an ad just to run up the advertiser's bill. But it would certainly not be the last.

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Click fraud is like a menace of more so an online disease for the advertisers and the merchants who put their money into it . Actually completely shocking is that stopping it completely is out of hands for everyone . And add to it the fact that there are huge groups which people form to click on each others ads in such a way that they look so legitimate that even google cannot realize that they are fake clicks , mainly because they are not uniform as they are very intelligently done in a random way and from PCs all over the world so Ip check also fails . I have seen such grumps on orkut also where they click on ads in a circle randomly .