What is Click Flooding?
A click fraud that prevalently occurs in the affiliate marketing industry is click flood or click spamming.
Click flooding, though easy to detect, is a notorious fraud practice that drains the budget of many unaware affiliate advertisers. Click flood, in simple terms, refers to the practice of generating fake clicks using bots.
To achieve click flooding, a fraud publisher generates numerous fake clicks hoping that one of those clicks will be counted as the last click before an app is downloaded by the user.
If the click flood attempt is successful, the fraudster gets paid for the download, even though the user would have downloaded the app anyway.
How Does Click Flooding Work?
When a user goes to a website or app that is being operated by a fraudster, that is when click flooding happens. There are a number of ways in which click spam could take place.
- A fraudster can track vendors by sending clicks from fake device IDs.
- The website visited by the user may be sending clicks, even without a visible ad, in the background.
- When a user visits an app that is being operated by the spammer, clicks may be executed in the background by the fraudster without any action from the user. This makes it look like the user is engaging with the ads, even when they are not.
- Fraudulent apps that keep running in the background 24/7 can generate clicks anytime.
Effects of Click Flood on Affiliate Marketers and Advertisers
Click flood is one of the most damaging frauds out there harming the affiliate marketing industry.
It is estimated that almost 40% of the total traffic on sites is bot generated, including false clicks and impressions.
Meaning, this traffic does not generate any revenue for the marketers or advertisers. On the contrary, it drains your budget without any results to show for it.
Click flood has a number of effects on the affiliate marketing industry, here are a few important ones:
-
Inaccurate Performance Metrics:
Since performance metrics such as the CTR are boosted fraudulently, click flooding makes it difficult for you to analyze the effectiveness of your ad campaign.
-
Low Conversion Rates:
When a fraudster carries out click spamming, it mixes genuine and fake user impressions which can be quite confusing for advertisers and marketers. As a result, you will be unable to efficiently interact with your target audience base leading to low conversion rates.
-
Hiked Up Costs:
Since click flooding leads to clicks and impressions that come from bots and not from actual users, it leads to a drain on your advertising budget. This means there are no real conversions and ultimately loss of ROI.
Types of Click Flood
-
Impressions-as-Clicks:
An impression is recorded when the ad is played. A click is recorded when a user interacts with your ad. With impressions-as-click fraud, an impression is recorded as a click, even without any interaction from the user. A fraudster activates a script on content and ads, with the intention of triggering clicks automatically as soon as an ad is played. This makes an impression count as a click.
-
Device Clicks:
Device click fraud or device click flood, in simple terms, is when a spammer uses fake device IDs to send clicks to vendors.
These clicks may look like a user has engaged with your ads, although it is just bot clicks and impressions.
No actual user has interacted with the ads in this case.
-
Background Clicks:
When a spammer generates clicks in the background of any mobile app or website, it is called background click flood.
This type of fraud can be carried out in a number of different ways such as invisible buttons, hidden frames, etc.
How to Protect Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign from Click Flood
-
Stay Up to Speed with Your Campaign Performance
One of the easiest yet most efficient ways to prevent click flood fraud is by monitoring your campaigns regularly.
When you keep a regular check on your campaign performance you can easily detect potential issues and offer a solution before they affect your performance.
To make sure your campaign keeps performing at its best potential, keep an eye on metrics such as traffic sources, conversion rates, engagement patterns, etc.
-
Leverage Reporting and Analytics to Protect Your Campaign
When protecting your campaign against click spamming, incorporating advanced analytics and reporting tools is a great idea. This is because with these tools you gain access to detailed analysis and insights into your campaign performance.
These insights can then help you detect and put an end to any fraudulent activities.
Analytics and reports can help identify unusual traffic patterns that may indicate fraud. They also help segregate traffic on the basis of device, location, source, etc. When you are able to track the conversion path, identifying fake conversions becomes much easier.
Set up custom alerts that indicate significant changes in traffic and review the reports regularly to identify trends and boost the effectiveness of your campaign.
-
Implement CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHAs are a great tool to ensure that the user interactions on your website are legitimate and not just bot clicks and impressions.
Every one of us has come across a CAPTCHA at least once. CAPTCHAs present tasks that seem simple to humans but are quite difficult for bots.
While answering a CAPTCHA question may seem annoying and pointless to use, it serves a very specific purpose.
CAPTCHAs help distinguish human users from bots.
But at the same time, it is important to remember to use a less intrusive CAPTCHA so that you can maintain a balance between security and protecting user privacy.
