Marketing Advice That Matters
If you have an online business and run pay-per-click advertisements to promote it, you need to be vigilant about preventing click fraud. This type of illegal activity can waste your advertising budget and prevent you from getting the return on investment that you deserve. Fortunately, there are various ways of click fraud detection, and you can use these to ensure that your PPC advertisements reach your target customers.
What is click fraud?
Click fraud is the illegal activity of generating fraudulent clicks that business competitors, ad publishers, and fraud rings engage in to exploit online advertisers. The fraudulent clicks happen with pay-per-click advertisements, and generally, individuals, software programs, or bots are responsible for generating them. Such clicks drive up advertising costs to the detriment of the advertisers.
Additionally, since the clicks are not by real visitors, they lower conversion rates. They also mess up the user data and may cause many companies to make wrong business decisions due to the skewed information available. This type of click fraud can have long-term repercussions on businesses, and that is why it is necessary to use various click fraud detection techniques to prevent it.
What to do to prevent click fraud?
You may find the following click fraud detection techniques helpful for preventing click fraud with your PPC campaigns:
Advertise on reputable websites: When you advertise on websites, the website gets a percentage of what you are paying Google for each ad click. So, if there are more clicks, the website will get higher revenue. That has led some websites to engage in click fraud. When you advertise with trustworthy people and monitor user activities regularly, you may be able to prevent click fraud.
Use industry-specific keywords: It can help if you research and use industry-specific, specialized keywords and phrases that your business competitors have not yet targeted. You can also make sure that your ad copy, landing pages, and ad format are unique and of the sort that will appeal to your target customers. That can increase the chances of your advertisements reaching real customers and increase your conversion rates.
Monitor user behavior: You can detect suspicious activities by regularly monitoring user behavior. For instance, you can check if you are getting too many clicks from the same IP address and whether the user is generating the clicks using the same device, internet browser, and software. You can check if there are too many click timestamps (a log of people clicking on your advertisements and visiting your website) and comparatively negligible action timestamps (a record of the actions visitors took on your website). If you find these issues, it might point to click fraud. You can then exclude the suspicious IP addresses with the IP exclusion feature that Google Ads offers. It is possible to exclude up to 500 IP addresses per PPC campaign. If the fraudulent clicks come from a specific geographic location, you can exclude the postcode.
Invest in click fraud prevention software: Since there are various options in click fraud prevention software, you may be able to find one that suits your budget. This type of software can protect your Google Ads account from unwanted and wasteful ad clicks by allowing you to control your paid traffic. It can automatically detect and block IP addresses using the same device, flagged click sources, VPN IPs, and different level bots, spiders, spyware, and malware.
Remarket PPC campaigns: When you remarket your PPC campaign, you target people with a record of having visited your website before and purchased or downloaded your products or services. Since only these targeted customers will see your advertisements, the fraudsters will be left out automatically. That can protect you from unwanted clicks on your ads.
Use the Google Traffic Quality program: This program offers one of the best-automated click fraud detection methods available. With the help of machine learning and complex algorithms, the automated system detects fraudulent clicks in real-time. Google will not charge you for these clicks, and the program will take immediate measures to block the click sources. Additionally, you will get second-level protection from the regular traffic monitoring and analysis that the Traffic Quality program team will undertake to detect and block suspicious clicks.
