Click fraud glossary

Pay per result is an advertising payment model where advertisers only pay when a specific, measurable outcome occurs, such as a sale, lead, or conversion. This approach helps protect advertisers from wasting money on ineffective clicks or fraudulent traffic by ensuring payment is tied directly to tangible business results.

Pixel stuffing is a deceptive technique where advertisers hide multiple ad impressions within a tiny, nearly invisible 1x1 pixel area on a webpage. This fraudulent method allows scammers to generate fake ad views and inflate billing, tricking advertisers into paying for impressions that users never actually see or interact with.

Pop-under ads are online advertisements that open in a new browser window behind the current window, often without the user's immediate awareness. These ads can be intrusive and are sometimes used in click fraud schemes to generate fake traffic or mislead advertisers about website engagement.

Programmatic advertising is an automated method of buying and selling digital ad space in real-time using software platforms. While it can help target specific audiences efficiently, it also creates opportunities for click fraud, where bots or malicious actors generate fake clicks that drain advertising budgets and skew performance metrics.

Programmatic fraud is a deceptive practice where bad actors manipulate digital advertising systems to generate fake clicks, impressions, or conversions. These fraudulent activities use automated tools and bots to simulate human traffic, draining advertising budgets and skewing performance metrics for unsuspecting businesses.

A proxy is an intermediary server or IP address that masks your original internet connection, allowing you to hide your real location and identity online. In the context of click fraud, fraudsters use proxies to generate fake clicks from different locations, making it harder to detect and prevent invalid traffic to your advertising campaigns.

A publisher is a website or digital platform that displays ads from advertisers, earning money for each click or impression. In the context of click fraud, publishers might intentionally generate fake clicks to increase their ad revenue, potentially causing financial harm to advertisers and undermining the integrity of online advertising.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is an automated digital advertising process where ad impressions are bought and sold instantly during webpage loading. Advertisers compete in milliseconds to display their ads, which can potentially expose websites to click fraud and generate invalid traffic through programmatic buying platforms.

A referrer domain is the website that sends traffic to your site by linking to it. In the context of click fraud, scammers might use fake or hijacked domains to generate bogus clicks on your ads, making you pay for traffic that isn't genuine or valuable to your business.

A residential IP address is an internet connection assigned by an internet service provider (ISP) to a home network, making it appear like a real user's internet connection. These IP addresses are considered more legitimate and trustworthy compared to data center IPs, which can be used to generate fraudulent clicks on online ads.

Revenge clicks occur when someone intentionally clicks on an online advertisement repeatedly to drain the advertiser's budget, often out of anger or as a form of retaliation. These malicious clicks are designed to waste the advertiser's money by generating invalid traffic and depleting their advertising funds without generating genuine interest or potential sales.