Summary
Such click frauds can harm your campaigns and prevent you from getting the intended results, so it is essential to identify and prevent them.
You may tweak some of your business practices or add a click fraud detection service to prevent them. However, it’s important to note that click frauds don’t go away. The only thing you can do is to minimize their impact on your business.
Do you wonder why your prospect level is not progressing after all the money you’ve spent on marketing, specifically PPC Ads? You’ll be surprised that bots are the cause of why your prospects level is not increasing after all the marketing and PPC Ads you’ve paid to.
Bots waste your advertising budget by clicking over and over again on your Google and Facebook ads. But why does there are bots that ruin your marketing?
That’s what we’re going to talk about in this blog. We’ll tackle everything about this click fraud and how you can prevent this from affecting your PPC Ads campaigns. Keep reading to learn more!
What is a Click Fraud?
When using PPC Ads in your marketing, you’ll pay every time someone clicks your advertisement. If you’re performing your job correctly, you ought to anticipate plenty of those clicks to result in a purchase.
You can make three transactions for every ten clicks you receive. But what if users start clicking your ads without the intention of buying anything or using your website?
Click fraud, as it’s called, may cause issues for advertising. With this, paying for clicks that aren’t real if users or bots falsely click on your adverts could happen.
This may consume your daily advertising budget, preventing your message from reaching its intended audience.
Who’s Behind Click Fraud?
With the intense competition in the market, it’s not surprising to know who’s behind your marketing downfall.
1. Competitors Click Fraud
Competitors aim to ruin ad tech marketing initiatives and inflict as much financial loss as possible. In each case, the competitor’s click fraud primary objective is to cause harm rather than drain the campaign’s funds.
2. Publishers Click Fraud
Aside from your competitors, publishers gain directly from fraudulent clicks that cause harm to your business. A portion of the money you pay to Google for every click you use to display advertisements goes to the publisher. The publisher earns more money when more people click on their adverts.
Types of Click Fraud
There are two main types of click fraud:
1. Manual Click Fraud
The fraud is easily done manually. To inflate performance metrics and increase their income share, the fraudulent party will typically employ real people to make clicks on specific advertisements. It can have some effects but isn’t nearly as effective as an automated process.
An example of manual click fraud is clicked farms, where numerous individuals click on advertisements continuously.
Conversely, this kind of click fraud might also have good intentions because many publishers ask users to “support their site by clicking on advertisements.” However, these clicks must be ignored because they are useless for a campaign’s objectives.
2. Automated Click Fraud
Automatic click fraud includes the development and upkeep of networks of bots intended to carry out specific workflows that cause clicks to be recorded by computer systems as valid events.
How to Identify Click Fraud?
Many click fraud detection programs use AI and other potent techniques to identify artificial or bot traffic using heuristics and pattern recognition. Complex algorithms and AI are utilized to build mechanical detection systems that detect and eliminate invalid clicks before marketers are billed.
AI can help you save time and money by identifying the apparent indications of click fraud and helps in the automatic removal of fraudulent clicks.
How to Determine If Your Website Is Affected by Click Fraud?
Being able to evaluate data is crucial to the success of PPC advertisements. To determine if you have encountered ad fraud, you need to look at the events when people click on your advertisement and where the clicks come from.
To do this, gather the following:
- IP addresses
- Click time stamps
- Action time stamps
- User-agent
Use this information to spot many clicks that may originate from the same individual but never result in a response. If you notice many clicks coming from the same IP address without a response or time stamp, make a serious move to stop click fraud.
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If you have any suspicions, report a concern to Google so they can further investigate. The data always has the answers. Therefore, if you have PPC experience and notice something is wrong with your statistics, it is always beneficial to look further.
Why Does Preventing Click Fraud Important?
Choose PPC Advertisements among any marketing even though you have many advertising options because of the guaranteed return on investment it provides. However, you won’t get a return on your investment if you’re the target of click fraud.
What’s worse is that your rivals are probably profiting from the click fraud, irrespective of whether it was their idea to do it. That’s why dealing with click fraud beforehand is important to save your business from financial downfall.
8 Ways to Prevent Click Fraud
Click fraud might be tough to detect. Nonetheless, there are certain preventative measures you can take. Although there is no perfect method to stop click fraud, you can lessen its effects if you know it.
Here are five actions you may take to reduce click fraud’s negative effects on your PPC ads.
1. Configure IP Exclusions in Google Ads
Restrict specific IP addresses from Google Ads if you’ve reviewed your statistics and determined they are fraudulently clicking your ads. Go to your Ad’s account settings tab and select IP exclusions to do this.
This could help you identify click fraud on your advertisements, but since some of these schemes are highly clever, it’s not a guaranteed approach.
2. Consider Your Display Ad Running Methods
Display advertising is more prone to click fraud. This makes sense because the additional part about publisher click fraud isn’t present in search advertisements.
However, choose how your display advertising is shown by concentrating on retargeting. Retargeting ads are only shown to persons who have visited your website in the past. This implies that the publisher will not be authorized to view your adverts on their website or continue clicking them.
At the same time, it makes it harder for fraudulent people to click on your advertisements unintentionally.
3. Concentrate on Ad Targeting
In some cases, a minor change to your targeting is all that is necessary to eliminate fraudulent clicks. Exclude those areas and their related languages if you believe click fraud originates from a certain geographic area.
A competitor’s postal code, city, etc., can be excluded if you think they are engaging in click fraud. Remember to avoid reducing good traffic in the process. Set these exclusions only if you think most clicks produced in these locations are false.
4. Install a Click Fraud Protection Software
Various companies offer several click fraud protection services. These services can keep an eye on your ads and prevent false clicks.
Here are some click fraud services that you can use:
- ClickCease
- PPC Shield
- AppsFlyer
- Singular
- ClickGUARD
Save money using these solutions, typically costing about $50 monthly for a basic subscription. Depending on the size of your PPC ads and whether you suspect click fraud, choose to invest in this type of security.
5. Use Honeypots
Ad servers use unique adverts disguised as bluffs that look like human users. If a bot encounters them and intervenes, the honeypot remains with it and carries out its mission, exposing the bot and blocking its IP address.
6. Constant Metric Audits
Metrics are challenging. It is necessary to continually verify metric accuracy while comparing its findings with multiple sources to represent the real state of things. Never hesitate to make a second check.
When things are viewed in their proper context, it is simpler to spot where problems begin and take action before permanent damage is done.
Following is a list of typical suspicious activity. These patterns are unmistakable indicators that something is wrong:
- An advertising campaign experiences abnormally high click-through rates.
- Compared to other parts of the website, the traffic rates of sites with PPC ads are considerably greater.
- Activity surges and unusual traffic peaks occur irregularly for the particular location.
7. Ad Verification
Ad verification is one of the most important strategies for preventing ad fraud, particularly click fraud. It functions as a sort of double secure instrument. In essence, it aids in locating gaps in your defense against ad fraud.
Many ad verification vendors offer insights into performance with various indicators, including fraudulent traffic and viewability.
These tools can help you block low-quality publishers, identify suspicious sites, and conduct a full campaign audit that may assist in the optimization of campaigns.
8. Switch to Social Media Ads
Social media adverts are far less keyword-based than paid search engine advertisements. As a result, people will have much more difficulty entering a term to find your advertisement.
Because social media platforms like Facebook have access to so much user data, it is feasible to target your audience accurately. This lessens the potential of click fraud and makes it possible for you to improve the efficiency of your PPC ads.
Social media sites do not have third-party operators like display ad networks do. Therefore, publisher clicks fraud is reduced, slightly increasing the safety of your advertisements.
Protect Your PPC Ads From Click Frauds!
Click fraud is just one of the more complex types of ad fraud. It takes advantage of people and attempts to drive serious losses in advertising campaigns.
Though click fraud cannot fade away, that doesn’t mean you should be scared of it. Instead, find a way to prevent or reduce its effects on your marketing.
Did you like this article? If you want to learn more about preventing click frauds that could contribute greatly to your brand’s awareness, you can do so by reading my previous blogs below.
