...inks provided by Google or other searchengines. The owner of a website owner may generate income forthe website simply by manually clicking on ads multiple timesevery day. An automated script or computer program may also beused to generate clicks and such automation can generate a largeamount of traffic. Several websites may use the same keywords to advertise inGoogle's AdWords program. The administrators of each website maymake a bid for the keywords and set a daily limit fo...

...r the amountof money spent on clicks. If a website administrator has set adaily limit for clicks, then his or her competitors may depletethe daily budget by clicking repeatedly on the sponsored links.After depleting the daily budget, only the competitor's ads areshown and generate traffic for real visitors. Click fraud can therefore cost you and knowing how to detect itcan save you money. As mentioned above, click fraud may be committed by manuallyclicking on ads or by computer programs. A computer programperforming the clicking can operate from one computer or may bedistributed across many computers on the internet - for examplecomputers that are remote controlled by hackers. Detecting click fraud can be relatively easy or difficultdepending on the extent to which it is performed and the way itis done. If your competitor clicks on your ads on Google a fewtimes per day, you are unlikely to be able to discern this fromlegitimate clicks performed by potential customers. If however acomputer program is run from a single computer that generates alarge number of clicks, this is fairly easy to detect. Byanalysing the logs files which your hosting company makeavailable, you will be able to detect a sudden large amount oftraffic originating from one particular IP address. If howeverclick fraud is being perpetrated from a network of distributedcomputers then detection is more challenging. The first sign youwill notice is that traffic to your website has increased for noapparent reason. Detection is based on the fact that computerprograms are more likely to behave in a repetitive fashion thanhuman beings. Here is what you need to look for: * Do you suddenly have a lot of traffic originating from acertain website or search engine? * Has the traffic to your website changed, so you suddenlyreceive more traffic from certain browsers or operating systems? * Have the paths of your visitors suddenly changed for noparticular reason, for example so more visitors now visit onlythe entry page? * Is a smaller percentage of your visitors suddenly buying yourproducts or signing up to your service? If you believe that you may be the victim of click fraud you maycontact your hosting company and ask for their help. If you areusing sponsored links with one of the search engines you maycontact the support at the search engines and they can help youwith investigation. Use of a computer to commit this type offraud is a crime in many jurisdictions, for example as coveredby Penal code 502 in California and the Computer Misuse Act 1990in the United Kingdom. If you are the victim of click fraud thenreport it to the appropriate authorities. Useful links: www.statcounter.com Statistics for your website.By placing a small piece of code on your web pages statcountertracks your traffic and generates statistics for it www.weblogexpert.com Program for analysing the raw log filesprovided by your hosting company. WeblogExpert provides a freeversion with limited functionality and as well as a full versionwith additional functionality.