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Counterfeit products peddled by influencers. Shady goods on the Facebook marketplace. The internet is full of fraudulent schemes. Among these bad actors are click farms, a particularly sinister fraudulent practice explicitly designed to drain businesses’ advertising budgets.Juniper Networks Research Estimates U.S. Businesses Will Fail $23 billion By the end of the year, this type of ad fraud scheme. Here’s what you need to know about click farms and three quick ways to stop them from harming your business.
What is a click farm?
A click farm is a physical location where a large group of workers manually clicks on pay-to-play ads at scale every day. These clicks increase the traffic and impressions of the ad, resulting in zero sales because these fraudulent clicks do not convert into sales.
How does click farm work?
Click farms generate a lot of “real” clicks. Bots are better for this, but websites are better at detecting bot clicks with captchas and other precautions. However, human factors have an impact on click farms, as click farm activity is more difficult to detect.
Here’s how the process works.
- Click on the farm worker to see it as an ad
- they click on the ad
- They will perform the necessary actions (download the app, fill out the form, post, follow the account, etc.)
- The attribution system considers the click to be valid and charges the advertiser.
Click farm workers repeat this process for each ad, some of which even create fake profiles using stolen online identities.
Take, for example, the $50 billion click farm problem plaguing China.according to Yahoo Finance, it is reported that click farms house and operate as many as 17,000 cell phones, which are also used to execute clicks at the request of buyers. The recent rise of click farms in urban China has influenced global advertising. In the US, $62 million of the $407 million in ad spend per user is wasted by ad fraud schemes.
How to detect click farms on ads
One way to detect if a click farm is draining your advertising budget is to monitor your traffic activity. Generally, click farms have the same pattern when it comes to “click farm” ads. They largely share the same phone model, IP address, device, geographic location, browser version, etc.
Once you notice that you’re getting clicks from specific areas and they all have the same pattern, check your engagement metrics. Ideally, any platform where your ad is served will give you an idea of how your ad is performing. If you notice a sudden surge in traffic and a high click-through rate but zero conversion rate, it may be a click farm attack.
The impact of click farms on ad campaigns
Wasted ad spend: This is often the most noticeable impact of click farms on ad campaigns. Advertisers are quickly charged due to fake clicks, draining their advertising budgets. Take an ad on Google, for example. Competitors can hire click farms to drive fake clicks on your ads. This can drain your advertising budget with little return. Once you can no longer fund your ads, Google will remove you from their platform.
Slanted Marketing Data: Making accurate marketing decisions relies on evaluating past results and identifying weaknesses and strengths to inform future strategies and improvements. Once this data is subject to fake clicks, marketing data becomes useless — without it, it’s difficult for advertisers to run ads that effectively convert traffic into sales.
Related: How AI Can Solve Ad Fraud: Here’s What You Need to Know
How to Combat Click Farms
1. Enable Restrictive Geolocation
In order for your ads to perform optimally, you must limit ad display to users certain areas A world famous for click farms. You can easily set this preference on any advertising platform. Alternatively, you can block specific IP addresses from accessing your ads. For example, if you see a sudden spike in traffic from Hong Kong IP addresses, you can block those addresses.
2. Select Task Prequalification Challenge
Human-verified CAPTCHA challenges are no longer as compelling or complex as they used to be. In less than 5 seconds, a click on a farm worker can bypass the challenge of accessing your ad. However, creating a task challenge that requires undivided attention can frustrate employees, preventing them from draining your advertising budget because they can’t do it at scale.
related: Ask these 6 questions to build a strong brand safety approach
3. Avoid fraudulent publishers and ad platforms
Sometimes the click farm that consumes your advertising budget comes directly from the publisher or supply-side platform you use. These platforms advertise ad space promising high traffic, clicks, views and impressions to help you connect with your audience. At the same time, the traffic they promise comes from click farms. Avoid this scenario by working with ad platforms and publishers that use ads.txt.
ds.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers and is a text file that allows publishers to list the resellers of their inventory. As an advertiser, this list is critical to preventing fake traffic and clicks from draining your advertising budget. Ads.txt benefits include protecting advertisers from fake ad inventory and easier access to matching seller IDs during bid requests.
To sum up the common click farm problem: The overall demand for clicks and user attention is a booming industry that unfortunately continues to attract bad actors. Ad networks generally provide some level of protection for all advertisers, but click farms have developed sophisticated systems to circumvent this protection. While there is no single solution to eliminating click farms, utilizing the strategies above can prevent fraudulent clicks from costing advertising budgets.
Related: How Ad Fraud Is Ruining the Internet
