Fake clicks
Click farms
Rooms of low-paid workers, or racks of phones, click ads by hand so the clicks look human because they are.
How it works
A click farm replaces software with people. Workers are paid a tiny amount per action to open pages, tap keywords and click ads. Because a real finger on a real phone produces the click, simple bot checks pass.
What gives a click farm away is not any single click but the crowd. The same devices appear again and again, the "visitors" share a few locations and networks, nobody ever buys, and the time between landing and clicking is suspiciously regular. Advertisers see spend with no sales; the search engine sees a publisher whose visitors never behave like customers.
Who pays for it
Advertisers pay for the clicks. The feed partner then loses the revenue through clawbacks and, under smart pricing, sees every later click on the account priced lower because the traffic has been shown not to convert.
Who does it, and why
Publishers and traffic brokers who need "human-looking" clicks to get past bot filters. Labour is cheap enough in some countries that paying people still leaves a margin when the clicks are on expensive keywords.
Warning signs
- A cluster of clicks from one city, mobile carrier or small group of devices outside the campaign's target market.
- Sessions that click an ad and leave the advertiser's site within a second or two, every time.
- High-value keywords clicked from places where the product is not sold.
- Activity that follows a shift pattern: starts, stops and breaks at the same times daily.
Defences
- Use Geo-targeting and check that the visitor's network location matches the campaign.
- Track repeat devices with device fingerprinting and cap how often one device can reach the feed page.
- Compare each source's clicks with downstream advertiser conversions where the feed reports them.
- Drop sources whose traffic looks human but never converts.
An example
Illustrative: say a keyword pays the publisher $0.80 a click and a farm worker is paid $1 for 50 clicks, or $0.02 each. Fifty clicks earn $40 at a labour cost of $1. The sum only works until the search engine notices that none of the 50 visitors did anything on the advertiser's site, then the $40 is deducted and the account is flagged. A real-world picture of the scale of such operations: a 2017 raid in Thailand reportedly found hundreds of phones and several hundred thousand SIM cards used to manufacture engagement.
Documented cases
- Google v. Auctions Expert International (2004): Publisher click fraud: a site owner paying people to click the ads on its own pages