There’s no way around it - with conducting business online comes the risk of being exploited by digital fraudsters, especially in the PPC world. And oh, my are there a lot of types of PPC fraud flourishing out there, in cyberspace!

Bots are obedient little “beings”. When you give them a job to do and instruct them on exactly how to do it, they're off to the races to get the job done. Bots can easily imitate or replace the behavior of a human being. Whether they’re good bots or bad bots, they’re kind of like wizards when it comes to doing repetitive tasks.

Google Adwords can be a really great tool. It's helping to revolutionize the way people do business online. For those that understand how to use it effectively, it can be an absolute gold mine.

Click fraud refers to the practice of falsely increasing the amount of hits on a pay-per-click advert online. This means that any click on an advertisement that has no possibility of converting into real business for the advertiser can be defined as a click fraud. The practice involves either third-parties, or publishers artificially increasing the number of times an advertisement link is followed using either low paid workers, or bots. Common motives behind click fraud are:

Rampant digital fraud is making online marketing difficult (and expensive) to navigate.

To demonstrate the titan that e-commerce has become, the global e-commerce market had $3.5 trillion in sales which is representative of 14% of the total share of global retail sales by the end of 2019, according to data from Statista. That percentage is expected to increase to $4.2 trillion and 16% of total retail sales in 2020. As online businesses grow, targeted Pay Per Click ad fraud is on the rise.