Click Fraud
There are many types of ad fraud that impact advertisers, although click fraud is one of the most common. Click fraud refers to a type of digital fraud in which bots pretend to be real people and repeatedly click on ads. In some cases with poor attribution technology, they can then seem to be the click that resulted in an app install, a site visit, or a marketing conversion.
Click fraud has long been a problem online. With online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website owners are paid based on how many users click on the ads on their site. By using bots to impersonate real user activity and click on ads, the malicious actors are able to both waste advertisers' PPC budget and also generate revenue for website owners. Since these clicks are carried out by bots, click fraud typically occurs on a large scale and each ad is repeatedly clicked in an automated process.
Click fraud is also a problem for mobile app marketers, because fraudsters hope that click spamming can lead to view-through attributions or last-click attributions.