Click Fraud:
- The deceitful practice of posing as pay-per-click traffic for the purpose of generating false revenue by the affiliates serving the ads. In PPC advertising terms, it generates a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.
This, like the click bot, gives black hat affiliates an unfair advantage over the honest affiliates paying for legitimate traffic. The black hat, or unethical, affiliates click on the links repeatedly or from proxies to pose as interested traffic that boosts the click rates that increases how much the affiliates get paid, but in reality these clicks shouldn’t count because they’re not individual web users interested in the product or service being advertised, which is what the merchant is essentially paying for.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
