How do you detect incentivised clicks?

Very high click rates paired with near-zero time on the advertiser's site. Referrers or app names associated with rewards, surveys, offer walls or "earn" programmes. Page text or arrows that direct attention to the ads ("click below", "choose an option to continue"). Traffic priced well below normal for the country.

How do you prevent incentivised clicks?

Ask every traffic seller in writing whether users receive any reward, and stop buying if the answer is vague. Remove any wording that encourages clicking; label the unit plainly as ads or related searches. Check placements and referrers for rewards inventory and add them to a Blocklist.

Incentivised clicks: how it works, warning signs and defences

Incentivised clicks

Visitors are rewarded with points, cash, prizes or unlocked content for clicking ads, so they click for the reward, not out of interest.

The short answer, from The Arbitrage Desk fraud map

How it works

An incentivised click is a click someone was paid or nudged to make. The reward can be obvious (coins in a rewards app, a "click to earn" site) or subtle: a line asking readers to "support us by clicking the links", or content that stays locked until an ad is clicked.

The visitor is real and the click is deliberate, yet the advertiser gets nothing, because the visitor wanted the reward and not the product. Feed policies from Google and Yahoo ban encouraging clicks in any form, including wording placed near the ads. Incentivised traffic bought in bulk and pointed at a feed page has the same effect.

Who pays for it

Advertisers pay for uninterested visitors. Publishers who used the traffic lose the revenue on review and risk the feed, even if a traffic seller hid the incentive from them.

Who does it, and why

Rewards apps and "get paid to" sites selling cheap traffic, and publishers who word their pages to push clicks. The traffic is cheap because the users cost only a few points each.

Warning signs

Very high click rates paired with near-zero time on the advertiser's site.
Referrers or app names associated with rewards, surveys, offer walls or "earn" programmes.
Page text or arrows that direct attention to the ads ("click below", "choose an option to continue").
Traffic priced well below normal for the country.

Defences

Ask every traffic seller in writing whether users receive any reward, and stop buying if the answer is vague.
Remove any wording that encourages clicking; label the unit plainly as ads or related searches.
Check placements and referrers for rewards inventory and add them to a blocklist.

An example

Illustrative: a rewards app gives users 10 points (worth, say, half a cent) to "visit a partner page". A broker sells those visits at $0.01 each to a publisher whose feed page earns $0.30 per ad click. If 30% of visitors click an ad to collect their points, 1,000 visits cost $10 and "earn" $90. Advertisers receive 300 visitors with no interest, the conversion data shows it within days, and the $90 is clawed back.