Invalid clicks are ad campaign clicks initia
ted by robotic means or manually by individuals to inflate reported clicks for a given ad. There are five major classes of invalid clicks:
Bad Spiders.
Clicks that are inadvertently initiated by a spidering application that is poorly written and do not obey standard robot instructions issued by a Web server. Thousands of applications spider the Internet for a variety of purposes, such as gathering pages for search engines and RSS feeds.
Speed Demons.
Clicks arising from wireless applications or ISPs that seek to lower Web latency for low bandwidth connections by clicking on links in a Web page. One example of this type of invalid click generator is Radialpoint’s Freedom Secure Web Proxy, which in 2005 began to be distributed by several Canadian ISPs and briefly generated massive invalid clicks across the Web.
Commission Collectors.
Clicks that are generated by individuals that seek to gain commissions from an ad network.
Sore Losers.
Clicks that are generated by either a robot or an individual on a competitor’s ad with the intention of causing additional cost to that competitor. This is seen most often on very high-priced search keywords such as “private jets”.
Badware.
Clicks that are generated by a consumer who was already going to the advertiser’s landing page without the assistance of advertising. This can occur when the consumer’s computer is infected with an adware application. The adware detects the URL as the user types it into the browser, pops up an ad with a search ad for that URL, and hopes the consumer will click on their ad, giving them a small commission.
