Systems and methods for detecting instances of click fraud are disclosed.
Click fraud occurs when, for example, a user, malware, bot, or the like,
clicks on a pay per click advertisement (e.g., hyperlink), a paid search
listing, or the like without a good faith interest in the underlying
subject of the hyperlink. Such fraudulent clicks can be expensive for an
advertising sponsor. Statistical information, such as ratios of unpaid
clicks to pay per clicks, are extracted from an event database. The
statistical information of global data is used as a reference data set to
compare to similar statistical information for a local data set under
analysis. In one embodiment, when the statistical data sets match
relatively well, no click fraud is determined to have occurred, and when
the statistical data sets do not match relatively well, click fraud is
determined to have occurred.