Click fraud can stop a finely tuned PPC campaign in its tracks, end up demolishing your marketing budget and cost you sales.
If you’ve never heard the term click fraud in regards to PPC, it’s the process of someone clicking your ads with malicious intent.
If you use partner networks on Google, Bing and Yahoo, website owners who serve your ads receive a small payment each time an ad is clicked. It’s not uncommon for low quality sites to fraudulently click their own ads or hire others to repeatedly click ads to increase their website revenue.
Competitors are also known to click rival businesses’ ads, often to bully them out of using keywords and to diminish their budget. Other times it’s the business themselves clicking on ads to increase their quality score (this violates most operators’ terms of service).
In all 3 cases, platforms do their best to minimize the amount of click fraud but they don’t catch everything. With a bit of basic knowledge and best practice tips, you can safeguard your campaigns to minimize click fraud this Christmas.
Here’s how to prevent Click Fraud:
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Specific country targeting
In parts of the world where the cost of labour is cheap, agencies known as ‘click farms‘ are setup whose job it is to solely click on adverts. Freelancers in Asia can be hired from as little as $3 per hour and it’s been known for businesses to use their services to target competitors’ ads.
To avoid this happening to you, only target countries in your ads that generate leads and sales. If you never receive traffic from China or India, it’s a smart move to exclude these countries from your targeting options.
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Advertise on high quality websites
When serving ads through the Google, Bing and Yahoo partner network, you’ll have the option to serve ads on websites of your choice. Websites with a low Page Rank and MozRank are considered less trustworthy, and therefore more likely to click their own ads to increase their revenue (generally speaking).
Avoid placing ads on sites that appear spammy or of low quality.
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Exclude suspicious IP addresses
If you’ve been a victim of click fraud and located the IP address of the culprit, AdWords and Bing Ads lets you exclude specific IP addresses from being served your ad. To setup an IP exclusion on AdWords, click on the Settings tab of your campaign, and head to Advanced settings where you can manually exclude IP addresses.
Click here to learn how to exclude IP addresses on Bing Ads.
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Focus on social media
Click fraud on social media platforms is greatly reduced because ads are only served within their platform, and targeting is not based on keywords making it much more difficult for competitors to find your ads. Unless you’ve targeted a competitor directly, they won’t be able to see it or hire freelancers to leave negative comments or excessively click your content.
You must also create an account to use social media, which provides another barrier for fraudsters to sabotage campaigns.
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Use a monitoring tool
Nobody wants to take hours out of their day to monitor keywords and IP addresses to identify click fraud. AdWatcher is a click fraud detection tool that monitors and provides reports on all your PPC campaigns, identifying shady IP addresses and any activity that seems fraudulent.
AdWatcher comes with a 30-day free trial and suited for businesses who use PPC on a regular basis. Click Tracks and Improvely are two other tools that offer click fraud features as well.
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Always monitor your account
The fastest way to identify click fraud is to check your accounts daily. Google, Bing and Yahoo do monitor their network for click fraud but like I said earlier, click fraud can sometimes go unnoticed for months.
Start by looking at the frequency and reach of where your clicks are coming from, if they are coming from a single or small set of similar IP addresses, a single web browser or a country where you never make any conversions, these are red flags that suggest you may be a victim of click fraud.
Regular monitoring allows you to identity the problem faster, minimizing the financial damage it can have.
Summary
With the holiday season coming up, the final quarter is where most businesses allocate the lion’s share of marketing budget, the last thing you’d want is to lose large chunks of your budget to click fraud.
If you’re a business who relies heavily on Q4 sales and PPC marketing, keep a close eye on your PPC campaigns to ensure you don’t fall victim to click fraud.
Google, Bing and Yahoo all offer refunds for clicks which are deemed fraudulent, make sure to contact them if you feel you have been receiving fake clicks to get them to investigate further.
Nick Bridges
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