Glossary
Fake engagement
Artificial likes, followers, views, clicks or installs bought from farms and bots to make numbers look real. Used to warm accounts and fake social proof; counted as fraud by advertisers and platforms when it reaches their side.
Also called: bot traffic, inflated metrics, click farms.
Services sell any metric: comments under an ad, subscribers for a channel, installs for an app. Some of it is a tool of account farming (a profile with friends and likes looks real); some is fraud against advertisers (fake installs, fake leads). The second kind gets affiliates banned and networks blacklisted.
Advertisers detect it by what happens after the metric: a thousand installs and no sessions, a hundred leads and no one answers the phone.
Related terms: Fraud, Account farming, Trash lead.