Pay-Per-Click Fraud coming from advertisers and publishers. Google sues publisher for clicking on their own ads. In this April 17 article from the Washington Post. Author David A. Vise discusses the Google suit against Texas based Auctions Expert for allegedly clicking on it’s own Adsense ads to the tune of $50,000 of income.

Critics of Google claim this suit is a diversionary tactic to keep people from looking at the real problem of click fraud from the advertisers perspective. Many advertisers claim they are routinely paying for bogus clicks on their Adwords ads displayed across the Google network of small publishers sites. When a publisher displays Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click ads, they are called Adsense for publishers. Those same ads are called Adwords from the Advertisers perspective and those advertisers pay for each click on their ads.

Google offers the option of turning off Adwords ads that display on small publishers sites, know as “Content Sites” in the Adwords control center where advertisers set up their ads, deciding what keywords and phrases will trigger their own ads and how much they pay for each click. If those ads are turned off for “Content Sites” then they only display on Google’s own search engine results pages and a few very large distribution partners, like AOL web search.

Advertisers are claiming click fraud approaching as much as 50% of total ad spending in extreme cases. Click fraud has come to be known as “fraudulent clicks on Pay-Per-Click ads with no intention of buying anything from the advertiser”.