A member over at IHelpYou Forums started a thread named fraudulent clicks today where he discusses how his clicks on his AdSense reports skyrocketed in a single day. Someone was fraudulently clicking on those banner ads and he decided to report it to Google.
Pay Per Click advertisers take click-fraud into account when factoring ROI (return on investment) of the overall campaign. Besides for the obvious cons involved with click fraud, the thread discusses some of the, not so obvious, pros.
"Fortunately on AdWords, it can actually increase your position if it happens on a small scale." Google AdWords looks at two factors when deciding how to position ads. (1) The bid placed by the advertiser and (2) the CTR (click through rate) of that particular ad. So if a bid is lower then an other ad but the CTR of that lower priced ad is much higher, the lower priced ad can come up before the higher priced ad with the lower CTR. So that benefits the advertiser who is paying less for the ad.
Could it have been that the advertiser was the 'fraudster'?
