Abstract
This paper provides a real-life case-study of click-fraud. We aim to investigate the influence of invalid clicks on the time series of advertising parameters, such as the number of clicks and click-through-rate. Our results show that it can be challenging to visually identify click-fraud in real traffic. However, using powerful methods of signal analysis such as ‘Caterpillar’-SSA allows efficiently discovering fraudulent components. Finally, our findings confirm the hypothesis from previous works that attacks can be discovered via behavioral modeling of an attacker.
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- 1.
Google’s Protection against Invalid Clicks, https://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/adtrafficquality/invalid-click-protection.html.
- 2.
List of Fraud Statistics 2018, https://ppcprotect.com/ad-fraud-statistics/.
- 3.
Google AdWords https://adwords.google.com/home/.
- 4.
AdWords Help. Invalid clicks https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/42995.
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Pavlov, D., Chertov, O. (2019). How Click-Fraud Shapes Traffic: A Case Study. In: Chertov, O., Mylovanov, T., Kondratenko, Y., Kacprzyk, J., Kreinovich, V., Stefanuk, V. (eds) Recent Developments in Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Information. ICDSIAI 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 836. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97885-7_24
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