Click spam (click spamming, click flooding, fake clicks), lead spam (lead spamming) – definitions.
source: own elaboration
Although click and leads spamming are two of the most common scams in online marketing, these concepts are still not definable. We are not a science website, but we consider ourselves to be an expert in these areas - and that's why we'll try to answer the questions: what click and lead spamming actually is?
Click spam is an online fraud of intentionally generating a large number of invalid clicks. We treat incorrect clicking as every click that was made intentionally, but which was not intended to familiarize with the landing page (to which the click leads) or the offer and content placed on it. With click spamming we deal if the clicking person is not interested in either the advertiser's (or the owner of the landing page) offer itself or other content published on the site, but still performs the act of clicking (or outsource it).
Click spam applies mainly to paid Google Ads and may lead to generating inflated costs for the advertiser and running out of the daily limit of the Google Ads campaign(if the advertiser designated one). In such cases, fraud is usually carried out by unfair competition, dissatisfied customers or other entities that want to harm the advertiser.
Another form of clik spamming may also be the generation of artificial clicks by a person working for advertiser while promoting a specific advertising campaign. In this case, the goal may be to receive an inflated remuneration from the advertiser, increasing statistics, etc.
Clicks can be spammed by a human or group of people (as it happens on click farms), but also programs and applications specially created for this purpose.
The most important features of click spamming are:
- the purpose of the action (it may happen that this type of event will occur in a non-intentional way, in this case the clicking person is not a cheater),
- large amounts of invalid clicks generated - this amount should be understood as a value depending on the statistics of website, such as traffic on the landing page, daily Google Ads limit, etc.
- very low number of conversions from generated clicks - very small number of sales or other actions, defined as the desired effect of clicking an ad.
We hope that the above definition helped answer the question, what exactly clik spamming is? Let's now discuss the topic of lead spamming.
Lead is the contact details provided on the website in the form of a completed contact form or in another form sent to the advertiser in order to contact the person or companies to which the data relates. Lead should give the advertiser opportunity to contact a potential client, so when we talk about leads, we must also mention the protection of personal data. The person, concerned by the data given in the lead, should actively consent to the transfer of this data and agree to contact from the advertiserm that’s why leads are often defined as “the person who expressed interest in a product or service provided by the advertiser”. Leads can be delivered to the advertiser via the website and the forms placed on it, but they can also be provided by the company's partners - in this case we are dealing with the CPL model (cost per lead), that is the remuneration awarded for each lead, which meets the conditions set by the advertiser.
If we know what lead is, what will the lead spam be?
A lead spam (lead spamming, fake leads) is the contact information of a person or company transferred to a advertiser without obtaining the appropriate consents of the data subject, sent in an incorrect manner or containing errors or false information. Thus, the falseness of a lead can involve several aspects:
- firstly, the information may be transmitted in the wrong way (for example, by a badly completed form, incorrect phone number format, etc.),
- secondly, the given data may be false,
- thirdly, some data may be incorrectly entered or
- fourthly, the lead could be filled with correct data, but without the consent of the data subject.
In each of these cases, we are dealing with lead spamming, because we can’t use the data lead contains to contact a potential customer and conduct an appropriate sales conversation. It is worth mentioning that lead spamming is also associated with costs for advertiser, for example: service costs, calls made, messages sent, etc. Lead spamming can most often be found during affiliate campaigns when the settlement takes place in the aforementioned CPL model. In this case, if a dishonest partner, who is lead spamming your campaign, acts deliberately (regardless of whether using data without proper consent or if the given data is false), we deal with online scam.
