Stop Click Fraud Learn how to combat click fraud before it drains your ad budget.

Online retailers beware: Click fraud--which occurs in pay-per-click online advertising and involves artificially inflating traffic statistics--may be a larger problem than you think.

Most PPC search engines have systems in place that identify click-fraud patterns and don't charge the advertiser for the fraudulent clicks. Google, for example, can generally detect rapid, successive clicking from the same person or IP address. However, individuals involved in click fraud today are using more advanced cloaking technologies that may circumvent these preventive systems.

To find out if these sneakier attacks are being identified, MarketingExperiments.com, an online marketing research laboratory in Atlantic Beach, Florida, conducted an experiment earlier this year in conjunction with Clicks2Customers.com, a search marketing solutions provider. It focused on three Google AdWord campaigns running over a 10-day period in 2005. Duplicate clicks were determined by comparing IP addresses, language, browser settings, referring URL, time of click, OS and other criteria.