What Are Click Farms And How to Protect Your Ads From Them

The digital advertising industry depends on consumer clicks. In theory, the more ad clicks the better. 

However, more clicks don’t always equal good outcomes for ad campaigns. Amongst the many ad fraud techniques fraudsters use to produce invalid clicks, click farming is one that’s pretty long in the tooth. Its use continues to grow year on year.

Designed to produce vast amounts of fake clicks, leads, and views, click farms have the potential to destroy entire ad campaigns. In this article, we’ll cover click farms, click farming techniques, the threats they pose, and how to detect and stop them.

What is a click farm?

Click farms consist of large groups of exploited, low-paid workers who manually click on online ads, usually via mobile devices. The goal: increase clickthrough rate value, boost engagement metrics, and inflate impressions. They are usually found in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. The video below highlights click farms in China and how they look in practice.

Click farm workers don’t just click on a few ads here and there, but they perform fraudulent clicks in their thousands. Since real people click the ads in a click farm, the clicks can appear legitimate and are harder to detect. Plus, workers can mimic real user behavior by spending time on a website before clicking an ad or filling out forms. All this means click farms can drain ad budgets in the blink of an eye.

Click farms are generally used to carry out the following types of fraudulent behavior:

• Performing repetitive click-based tasks (such as click on ads)
• Clicking ‘like’ and ‘follow’ on social media platforms to generate ‘engagement’
• Generating website traffic

Lead farms, an offshoot of click farms, perform lead generation fraud by filling out forms with randomized information. Fraudsters usually run this practice in a more targeted way and on a smaller scale.

View farming is another branch of click farming. Here, workers target video ads (such as YouTube ads) at a high volume to obtain financial compensation.

Are click farms illegal?

Unfortunately, and despite click farms’ direct responsibility for committing click fraud, they are not as of yet illegal. 

Click farm workers are technically visiting websites and literally clicking on ads, unlike bad bots and botnets that mimic human behavior. That’s why the issue of click farms remains a grey area in many countries. Plus, most click farms operate in countries with very little labor law enforcement and low wages. That’s why most click farm prevention efforts focus on employee working conditions and human rights abuses.

What techniques are used in click farming?

Generally, click farming techniques are very simple. Low-paid workers manually click on ads in order to drain ad budgets. Operations lay out stacks of electronic devices for workers, giving them easy access to switch devices when necessary.

Many operations use mobile devices and SIM cards to create custom profiles modeled on specific demographics. For example, say a click worker is told to click an ad targeting men aged 20-30 who run long distances. They can build that exact ‘profile’ on a device to avoid detection. They create these profiles by browsing websites to collect cookies and searching certain keywords to build a profile around specific user intent.

Click workers can easily switch between different accounts depending on the ad they’re targeting. 

Click farms also use VPNs and proxy traffic to hide their geographies and bypass campaign location rules. They do this because advertisers in certain regions, such as the U.S., typically offer higher financial rewards on PPC campaigns.

The phones are real, and most actions require manual interaction. That lets click farmers hide in plain sight using both methods.

How to detect and prevent the effects of click farming 

The most common vehicle of click fraud isn’t a human “farmer,” but usually humans working behind software to commit ad fraud. Fraudsters choose the former option since it offers higher financial rewards, even though detection is more likely.

Click farms are one of the easiest ways to commit click fraud, but also one of the hardest to detect and prevent. Mimicking human behavior is much harder to detect with common fraud detection methods since it’s hard to pinpoint as invalid.

Typically, teams detect click farms by identifying interactions with the same telemetry. Most devices share telemetry unlikely to repeat across large numbers of accounts, like matching network speeds, IP addresses, browser versions, and phone models. That’s how teams spot click farm clicks. Identifying click farm activity manually is incredibly arduous and simply put, not feasible in a fast-paced digital ad world.

Preventing click farm activity, therefore, requires an approach that goes beyond blocking IP addresses. It needs to accurately identify fraudulent human traffic, namely dedicated anti-fraud solutions.

At Opticks, our solutions capture telemetry at network, application, and user level. This creates a comprehensive set of valuable data about each visit, helping determine whether the activity is legitimate or malicious. We then analyze this data using proprietary machine learning, blocking fraudulent traffic based on a risk score.

Our solutions are far more sophisticated than click farm operations and can detect atypical activity associated with fraudulent behavior.

Our vision of the future of click farming 

One of the biggest issues surrounding click farms is the fact that they are highly scalable. Click farm operators exploit workers in countries with both low wages and low employment. That makes finding human resources to perform click fraud incredibly easy.

Plus, with the digital advertising industry booming, the unfortunate reality is that as your business grows, so does the profitability of targeting it for ad fraud. 

However, in general, we see that the use of click farms to perform click fraud is decreasing. That’s partly because they cost a large amount of money to run in terms of electricity and devices. Plus, other fraud activities like review farming or cryptocurrency mining are on the rise. Anti-fraud solutions have also advanced enough to catch and shut down click farms early. That’s pushing fraudsters to move their fraud schemes to data centers and other systems that can scale even further.

That said, click farms will continue to operate for fraud that needs complex human interaction. Think cost-per-install (CPI) or complex lead generation campaigns.

Wave goodbye to click farming with anti-fraud software

Anti-fraud solutions provide the safest way to prevent budget-draining clicks. They also keep erroneous information from skewing your campaign data.

Anti-fraud solution Opticks can help you prevent click farm activity and many other types of ad fraud. That stops them before they can destroy your campaigns and empty your budgets. Find out more about how the expert team at Opticks can help protect your advertising campaigns. Contact our team here for a free demo or start your free trial.