Have you ever clicked your own adsense ads ? I bet you haven’t ! Maybe you’ve just done it once ?  Or maybe just by accident (it can happen you know) ?

Have you ever asked your friends to click on your adsense ads ? You wouldn’t do that right ? Have you ever devised a plan that’s sophisticated enough to trick Google into believing it’s different people clicking your ads, while in reality it’s just you traveling from location to location by bicycle ?  You would never do that, would you ?

The above examples are concepts of what the online marketing community calls ‘click fraud‘.  Click Fraud is when publishers of sponsored links (Google adsense or yahoo search marketing) deliberately click these sponsored links, on their own web pages,  in order to earn they commission money from those clicks.

Old topic, but never ending, since people are doing it all the time.  The reason I am writing this blog entry is because I have been repeatedly asked by someone to ‘click their adsense ads‘.

The case I’m telling you about is about a fraudster who’s active on a social media sites.  He’d repeatedly open a chat to me  in order to ask for click exchanges.  No preface, no story, just a ‘need click exchange‘ message.  I was surprised that after declining the first time, he kept on trying.

To make matters worse and to prove the low level of self-esteem that some adsense money hungry people have, believe it or not, I was even asked if I could ‘click their ads,  and look at it as charity‘ !

Stealing the Advertiser’s Money & Killing their Exposure

I don’t think that people realize how serious this subject is. Businesses who advertise through pay per click systems such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing are paying money in order to gain exposure on the web.

When someone deliberately decides to click a sponsored link in order to earn money, in essence they’ve neutralized the exposure of the advertising business. They advertising business is still paying Google, Yahoo, or whatever pay per click system they are using for that worthless click, since it’s not a potential customer or prospect who’s clicking the link.

Not only are businesses who are advertising through pay per click loosing money, clicks also drive click prices up in advertising systems. In other words the clicks eventually become more expensive.

I am all for making money online, be it through affiliate marketing, or adsense ad publishing (check out my sidebar) but what I would really like to see, is some more ethics and taste involved in the subject …

Also read : how social is your marketing