Pay per click: anti-fraud strategies and tools

There's no doubt that Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be a very profitable and cost-effective way to drive targeted visitors to your site. If you're new to the world of PPC advertising, you may want to read my introductory article on pay-per-click first.

Aside from the ongoing problems of pay per click, such as getting into bidding wars, there is a much more sinister challenge to overcome - fraud. 

It's quite amazing the lengths that some publishers will go to to commit fraud; and I'm not talking about the webmaster who clicks on your ad once a day to clock up his revenues, or the competitor who occasionally clicks on your ad out of spite. What I'm referring to is those parties who create complex robots to generate thousands of clicks, while spoofing IP addresses in order to fleece their advertisers and avoid detection. Then there's the competitors who do similar things - not to build revenue for themselves, but to drive other advertisers out of PPC listings and at times, out of business.