1Department of Engineering at Universidad Panamericana, Mexico
2Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Milan, Italy
3Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Murcia, Spain
Online published on 21 November, 2017.
Due to the enormous growth of the Internet and its impact on the lives of millions, online advertising has become one of the essential channels for any ad campaign. Internet advertising consists of three predominant models: the CPM (cost per mile), paying for every thousand times the ad is seen by users, the CPC (cost per click), quite literally paying per click, and CPA (cost per action), only paying if users perform a specific action such as a sale or registration.
As one would expect, the high revenue surrounding Internet advertising has become an attraction for many cybercriminals trying to get rich through scamming. Moreover, crimes committed online are harder to punish due to the complexity of detection with crimes being committed overseas as well as the fragility of evidence.
The main threats are the famous click-bots [8], software simulating human browsing behavior making unlawful clicks. These bots are getting better and better and becoming ever more difficult to detect. These click-bots flood the network with CPC traffic [20], as well as millions of invalid clicks causing a huge problem for small advertising networks that lack sufficient resources to deal with them.
There have been different options such as irrelevant ads using captcha codes or premium-clicks but have not proven particularly effective. Another idea has been to create a botnet-detecting network [28].
The technique of irrelevant ads is used to show ads irrelevant to the user's profile so if clicks are received they're probably being done by a botnet or a scammer [12]. Captchas ask users to solve a code to detect botnets [10]. Premium clicks are used to count clicks only those meeting certain requirements to ensure that they are true [18].
Bearing all this in mind we wonder if it would be better for advertisers to use the CPA model, paying for actions, rather than the CPC model, the current market leader. We have also considered whether the CPA model will be adopted as the mostly used model for future online advertising.
Throughout the article we will discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of this model, the main types of scams that can occur and how to detect them. We will also carry out a series of recommendations for a more competitive and more easily enforced model.
CPA Model, Advantages of CPA Networks, CPA Network Scams, CPA Solution & Improvement paths
