It’d be great if you could include in your article ways for companies to protect themselves against click fraud.

Thanks.

I’d like to discuss one problem which was not mentioned: click fraud.

Contextual advertising is prone to click fraud. The web site owners have a powerful incentive to click on their own advertisements. And it’s extremely difficult to detect if done discreetly.

SEM faces a different sort of click fraud. The clicks on search engine results generate profits for the search engine companies, so here, a different dynamics is at work.

A company could type in keywords for his industry, and then click on his competitors’ advertisements. This will exhaust their SEM budget on fake clicks.

How would you handle this problem?

Cheers.