Your Click Matters

Every time anyone visits a website, opens Facebook or has a peek at Youtube, they become part of that online community. This community of millions, floats around different corners of the internet. Unbeknownst to us all though, this community only makes up half of the online traffic on those websites. Alongside us, visiting all the same sites, clicking and commenting away, is an army of automated visitors, masquerading as real people. The click farmers.

Click farming is a clandestine web activity that shapes our online environment. These farms are usually set up in low-income countries and are simply racks upon racks of phones connected to a single computer. Each phone represents an individual user; one command from the computer operated by a click farmer can trigger hundreds of identical likes, follows or star ratings. These bots can also pretend to be part of an online community acting as a voice in the room, sometimes an extreme one.

In the world of digital advertising, when a click is highly regarded as a valuable interaction from a potential customer the question is; how is this affecting advertising and what does this mean for the future?

To put it into context, have you ever looked up your local kebab house or greasy spoon and noticed they have 2,000 five star reviews, a remarkable amount for any local eatery. The majority of people know these reviews are not real but we still use these indicators to inform our decisions. That is because people are flooded with information all day, everyday - so don’t have time to do their due-diligence.

This fraudulent activity represents a small proportion of where the majority of the fake activity is being steered towards - where the big money is; online advertising. By displaying legitimate advertising on their websites and then flooding them with bots to click on the display adverts, fraudsters can syphon off huge amounts from a marketing budget. One click-fraud prevention firm, Polygraph, puts the total figure at around $96 billion per year.

These fake clicks give the impression that the ad is doing its job and the customer is interested in the company or product. This leads to the ad platform paying out to the fraudsters and invoicing the advertiser or media agency - deceiving them that there ever was a customer. Money flows to the scammer who can achieve millions of clicks per month.

As for the impact on ordinary internet users, click fraud distorts our worldview and it can influence our political thinking. It can also persuade us to spend our cash unwisely and drain money from the economy. Tackling it however, is far from easy. Under current UK law it is illicit activity but not technically illegal.

Pressure has been mounting on firms in the eye of the fake click storm. So far Amazon, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor have taken the lead in announcing a new collaborative initiative to fight the fake reviews. Social media platforms meanwhile have experimented by hiding the count of likes and followers in an attempt to make users less fixated on popularity. Online networks in control of the placement of ads such as Google however, are getting payment for fake activity regardless.

While industry wide education and measures are needed to tackle the systemic fraud of these click- scammers, agencies need to remain more vigilant than ever in order to protect our clients budgets. For now the best route is to employ new tools and processes to mitigate appearing in unscrupulous environments. With quality comes a higher price, but also greater reliability.