Know Your Clicks, Google Says

Advertising clients who feed Google's revenue machine may not always know the difference between an illicit click and one that's outright fraudulent. Google wants them to understand which is which.

Ultimately, the online PPC advertising model depends on trust. The promise of having one's ad budget matched to relevant viewers who click through, giving the ad network a bit of revenue each time.

The model breaks down when someone games the system. An advertiser who sees lots of clicks and minimal conversions will be ready to believe the worst of PPC; some will go so far as to file lawsuits, as Arkansas-based Lane's Gifts did against several big names in recent years, claiming injury from click fraud.

Not every non-performing click is an attempt to defraud the advertiser. In a recent discussion at the It can come from several sources, like a publisher manually clicking on the ads on display, or having others do so themselves or with automated software. Sites pulling in clicks that look like click fraud may fall out of favor with a Google or any other ad network seeing such activity.

Some clicks are not good ones, but not all bad ones hold malicious intent. That's the basic difference between an illicit click and a fraudulent one.