Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is often considered a low-risk, high-reward marketing strategy. Thanks to its hyper-targeting capabilities and low cost, businesses can easily connect with high-intent prospects and increase revenue growth.
But even then, several marketers are still debating investing in PPC campaigns. The reason? Click fraud!
Click fraud is a malicious activity that compromises the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. It involves malicious actors generating fake clicks on your ads without the intention of buying anything. This leads to wasted ad spend and skewed campaign data.
Statistics reveal that advertisers lose approximately $5.8 billion a year due to click fraud. That’s huge, right?
That said, being afraid of click fraud does not mean that you should completely avoid PPC. You’ll be good if you are aware of the phenomenon and have employed certain proactive measures to protect your account.
In today’s blog, we will discuss valuable strategies to help you recognise and reduce click fraud in PPC campaigns. Let’s begin.
Understanding Click Fraud
Let’s start by talking about PPC ads.
PPC is a form of online marketing in which advertisers run ad campaigns on Google or any other platform. The advertiser pays a certain fee each time a user clicks on the ad.
If your PPC campaign is effective, you can easily expect many clicks to convert into a sale on your website. Statistics reveal PPC traffic converts 50% better than organic website visitors.
But what if people start clicking on these PPC ads with zero intention of purchasing? This is what click fraud is.
If people or bots deceitfully click on your ads, you may be paying for clicks that aren’t good. This can exhaust your daily ad spend without bringing in conversions or business revenue.
Image: Source
Types of Click Fraud
Now that you understand click fraud, let’s examine how it can occur.
· Click Farms
Click farms are malicious entities that employ people to click on specific links or ads. Fraudsters often hire click farms to commit click fraud against their competitors. This is typically done in two ways: artificially inflating online metrics that can get their competitors flagged for spammy behaviour or recurrently clicking on PPC ads to drain their competitors’ daily ad spend.
· Competitor clicks
Competitors always stand to gain from fraudulently clicking your ads. Many businesses use this spiteful practice to deplete their competitors’ PPC ad budgets and negatively impact your ad score. Competitors can do this by hiring click farms, bots, or their own company’s employees to click on ads.
· Publisher clicks
If you run PPC ads on a third-party website, its publisher also gets a small percentage of what you pay the search engine for each click. So if the website operator is a scammer, he can commit ad fraud by faking organic clicks and blowing off your ad budget.
· Bot clicks
An attacker may sometimes employ bots infected with malicious codes to commit click fraud. These bots act like real users, browsing websites and clicking on ads and links. Bots designed for click fraud can create high volumes of deceitful engagement that rapidly drains PPC ad budgets.
How does Click Fraud Affect Businesses?
PPC click fraud can significantly damage a business’s marketing efforts. It can also cause several other detrimental impacts, such as:
- It can affect a business’s bottom line, causing low ROAS. This is because most clicks stem from fraudulent activity without any meaningful ROI.
- It can make it hard to gauge the actual effectiveness of an ad campaign, owing to skewed metrics from fake clicks.
- It can lead to wasted time and effort for internal teams.
How to Recognize Click Fraud?
To effectively detect click fraud, one must monitor their PPC accounts. Using the right tools and techniques can also help identify these deceptive practices and secure their ad investments.
1. IP Address Surveillance
Tracking IP addresses is one of the most effective practices for click fraud detection. Use advanced analytical tools to closely monitor the IPs generating clicks on your ads. Consistent ad traffic from specific IP addresses without conversions is a potential red flag.
2. Recognizing Ad Clicks without Conversions
You may experience high click-through rates. If most of those clicks fail to translate into sales, something is surely amiss. Check for disparities between clicks and conversions, especially if the clicks come from unexpected regions or markets unrelated to your target audience. It could help to identify potential click fraud.
3. Recognize performance data anomalies
If your ad campaign data shows anomalies such as higher bounce rates, sudden spikes in traffic, or a decline in page views, it could also signify potential fraud.
7 Proactive Strategies to Prevent Click Fraud in PPC Campaigns
By now, you must be wondering why Google or any other search engine isn’t doing anything to prevent click fraud. Right?
Well, that’s not entirely true.
All search engines have designated task forces to deal with click fraud. Google, for instance, utilizes a three-pronged approach that begins with advanced filters. These filters proactively detect and eliminate invalid clicks in real time, long before the advertisers are charged anything.
Additionally, Google’s Quality Team, which regulates ad traffic, manually analyses each click, effectively minimising fraudulent clicks. Lastly, Google also launches investigations if any advertiser notifies it of falsified activities. Any time a fake click is detected, it is reported as ‘invalid’, and the advertisers get their money back.
This is what Google does to prevent click fraud as much as possible. Apart from this, there are several strategies that you, as an advertiser, can implement to eliminate click fraud and protect your ad budget. Let’s look at the most notable ones:
1. Implement IP Address Exclusions
This is among the most effective ways of preventing fake clicks. Once you go through your ad campaign data and identify certain IP addresses that click your ads without intent to buy, you can block them through Google Ads.
To do so, navigate to the settings tab in your Ads account and choose IP exclusions, as shown in the image below.
This simple technique can help you drastically reduce the click scam rate and ensure your ad budget goes to legitimate clicks from potential customers.
2. Use Advanced Tools to Detect Click Fraud
Investing in advanced click fraud detection tools is another excellent way to stay on top of your advertisement campaigns. These tools offer a comprehensive analysis of your PPC ads, including tracking the source of incoming traffic. Thus, they can swiftly detect anomalies and block suspicious IP addresses, helping to minimise the damaging effect on your advertising campaign and funds.
Moving on, here are some of the top-rated PPC click fraud detection tools you can choose from:
- PPC Protect
- PPC Shield
- Click GUARD
- AdTector
- Improvely
Choosing the right tool can sometimes get confusing. Ensure the one you select is user-friendly, offers key features such as IP address analysis, geo-location tracking, detailed reporting, etc., and provides native integrations with popular ad platforms like Google ads.
3. Set a Limit on the Frequency of Clicks
You can also limit the number of times a specific user can click on an ad. This can help prevent mindless clicking and safeguard your ad budget. It is a good idea to closely examine the typical actions of authentic visitors to determine the appropriate restriction on click frequency.
4. Use Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting is another effective strategy to reduce click fraud. You can use the technique to customise your PPC campaigns and target specific areas where your prospective audience pool will likely be situated. Additionally, you can implement time-of-day limits to ensure your ads only flash during peak engagement hours. This can help minimise malicious clicks from unidentified places or during strange hours.
5. Monitor and Audit Your PPC Campaigns Regularly
It is important to regularly audit your PPC campaign to identify and fix any fraudulent activities easily. Monitor campaign parameters such as click-through and conversion rates to evaluate ad effectiveness and safeguard your marketing efforts. Remember, abrupt increases or decreases in CTR may point to click fraud.
6. Use Google’s Fraud Protection Features
Popular PPC networks like Google Ads have built-in functionalities to avert malicious activities, primarily fraud clicks. They use advanced algorithms that effectively weed out false clicks. Additionally, they enable users to benefit from features like evaluating the Click Quality and even setting up conversion monitoring. All this helps to minimise the likelihood of click fraud.
7. Train Your Staff to Identify Click Fraud
Awareness is the first step towards prevention. Ensure your team overseeing your PPC campaign understands click fraud and can easily identify common signs of malicious activity. Also, they should be well-versed with anti-fraud tools and technologies you invest in for the best outcomes.
Conclusion
Click fraud is a common yet highly dangerous issue in the marketing industry. When you pay for every single click, you must get a decent return on your investment. However, fraudulent clicks can make this impossible.
Therefore, you must take a proactive approach to protect your PPC campaigns. Using advanced click fraud prevention tools can go a long way in safeguarding your precious ad budget.
