If you are using Google Adwords or other pay per click services as part of your marketing strategy hopefully you will never experience click fraud. If you are not sure what click fraud is, or what to do if you are a victim of it, then you need to read on.
As you know Adwords is run on the principle that you pay based on each occasion someone clicks on your ad or when your ad has been displayed a certain number of times. (normally 1000 views)
Click fraud occurs when those clicks or views are generated artificially either by an individual, a group of individuals or software called clickbots. If click fraud is being used on your AdWords ads, your costs can increase dramatically, your ad performance is greatly compromised and at the end of it all you won’t have had a single new customer or sale.
The people who perpetrate click fraud do it mostly for financial gain. Those who have sites in the content network scheme want to artificially inflate the number of clicks or views that appear to be coming from their site. By increasing them, they increase the revenue they receive from Google, which means both you and Google are victims of click fraud.
Another group click fraud could be perpetrated by is your competitors, especially when the primary keywords become part of a bidding war. By increasing your costs, they are hoping you will either lower your bids on a keyword or stop bidding altogether.