Click Fraud, a practice that can cost you dearly

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If you use Adsense, you've probably been tempted to click on ads on your own website to increase your earnings. You're not the only one, human greed and cunning know no bounds, but I'm sorry, Google has ways of detecting this scam, which they call click fraud.

Definition of click fraud
Click fraud is formally defined as the practice of repeatedly clicking on an advertisement hosted on a website with the intent to generate revenue or decrease the advertiser's revenue.

So, be careful, because click fraud can have two objectives:

Earn more money
Programs like Adsense pay you for every click users botim database on ads displayed on your website. This leads some publishers to try to artificially increase the number of clicks in various ways:

By clicking on the ads themselves
Asking friends, family and followers to click
Using bots that click automatically
It may seem like a good idea but in reality it is very bad because Adsense (and other advertising and affiliate platforms) have methods to detect this type of practices and penalize them harshly, in the best case invalidating your income and in the worst case eliminating you from their programs.

And it is normal for Adsense to pursue this fraud so much because its success is based on the clicks on the ads being able to be converted into sales. Otherwise, advertisers would not invest in it.

Annoying the competition
A malicious person may use click fraud to screw over a competitor. This type of fraud targets a specific company's ads, generating fake clicks to increase that company's Google marketing bill. The idea is to drain a competitor's marketing budget. Machiavellian, right?

There are many options for doing evil, so I hope you never think of something like that.

How does Google detect click fraud?
Google has its own methods for detecting fake clicks, although it obviously doesn't usually give many clues on the subject. Among the things that can raise the alarms of the Mountain View giant are:

High number of clicks but few conversions
Multiple clicks from the same IP
Suspiciously high CTR
Short time spent on the page
Come on, be honest. Have you ever fallen into the temptation of click fraud? Tell us in the comments.