What is a Click Farm and how to protect yourself from it? | fraud0

Why do click farms exist?

This question is pretty easy to answer: click farms exist to introduce human behavior into the click / ad fraud process. Most bots are very quickly recognized as such by their rigid behavioral patterns. Click workers are supposed to be perceived as real users on the respective websites due to their human and natural mouse movements and click intervals.

What are click farms used for?

There are many possible uses for a click farm. The following, among others, come into consideration.

Fraud with clicks on advertisements of own fake websites

Click farms often maintain a large network of their own websites. These usually look like a copy of existing offers in order to give a positive impression at first glance. The websites are created automatically with the help of bots, filled with stolen content and then registered for marketing in various advertising networks.

Click farm workers are then encouraged to visit these websites and click on the ads there. Since PPC (Pay-Per-Click) methods are often used, the Click Farm operators earn money on every ad clicked. How high this profit is depends on numerous characteristics of the placed advertisement – but it is definitely higher than the wage costs for the hired click workers.

With this method, click farms are responsible for a significant part of click fraud.

Increasing the reach of other companies

Increasing your own reach on the Internet is costly and complex – especially in industries with high competitive pressure. Plenty of time passes before a certain visibility is achieved and a lot of marketing budget has to be invested. Often, Likes, Shares, Retweets, Comments and similar indicators are used to see whether one’s business is increasing in terms of awareness and reach.

A Click Farm can drastically shorten this path, as Likes & Co. can be easily bought. For $10, for example, you can get 1,000 likes from a click farm in Bangladesh – much cheaper than a “real” advertising campaign with the same result. So, some companies deliberately use click farms as a cheaper substitute for advertising measures.

Such a high level of interaction in a short time can also additionally lead to increasing the virality of a post. Most platforms use algorithms that present particularly popular and highly interactive posts to their users more prominently in their feed – regardless of whether this prominence came about through interactions of real users or through a click farm.

In times when hype and virality is often the most important tool of all to differentiate oneself from the competition, this creates tempting incentives for companies to engage with a click farm.

Contract work – clicks to harm the competition

Some unscrupulous companies use the service of a click farm not to increase the reach of their own content, but to specifically harm their competition.

The hoped-for competitive advantage of this method opens up in 2 ways:

1. The daily budget limit of the competition is exhausted by the click farm already in the first hours of the day, which is why the own ads can be placed more prominently for the rest of the time (e.g. with GoogleAds).
2. The competition’s advertising budget is basically siphoned off with every ad click, which causes marketing costs to skyrocket and, if necessary, marketing activity is temporarily paused.