Recently, we’ve teamed up with the UK’s #1 Click Fraud Protection Service, Click Guardian, to offer our client’s powerful click fraud prevention.
Click fraud occurs when Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are repeatedly clicked on with the intention of wasting the advertisers spend. This then generates fraudulent charges for advertisers which will drain their budget. In 2017, it was discovered that around 1 in 5 clicks were fraudulent and this was rapidly increasing. Click fraud can be incredibly frustrating for advertisers and can often demotivate them from wanting to use PPC.
Who is behind the fraudulent clicks?
Every single industry and business will be affected by different types of click fraud and it is very rare that there is just one person/party involved. Some types of users are as follows.
1. Unhappy customers
Although relatively uncommon, sometimes you may have disgruntled customers who hold a grudge against your business for whatever reason. If these customers know a bit about pay per click advertising, then they may be clicking on your ads relatively often to waste your spend to get back at you. Even though this may seem like a strange way to act, it can waste an advertisers budget daily and, as a consequence, negatively affect their online marketing
2. Competitors
A vast majority of click fraud comes directly from competitors who are wanting to waste a users PPC budget so that they are number 1 on Google listings. As a daily budget is set in place when advertising on Google, once this has been reached then the adverts will often turn off for the rest of the day so that no one else clicks on them to spend more budget. This is then a green light for competitors to take advantage so that they receive a higher percentage of the impression share.
Competitors have a very strong motive to click on your ads and waste your budget as it allows them to get more clicks with little effort and lower cost per clicks (CPCs).
3. Bots
Competitors, unhappy customers and a huge range of users can use bots to carry out click fraud actions. Bots attempt to imitate legitimate web traffic to generate additional visits to a website (although they are fraudulent). This then compromises the advertiser’s budgets but this can be done on a huge scale with bots.
How we prevent it
We use an advanced monitoring and blocking solution to detect clicks that are fraudulent through a variety of rules and filters prior to blocking the perpetrator. Simply put, our system works in 3 stages – Monitor, Detect and Block.
1. Monitoring the ads
The Click Fraud service tracks clicks on your ads from the search, display and shopping networks. We then monitor the IP address, device, network type and other data points to determine the particular user’s location.
2. Detecting click fraud
All clicks are analysed and filtered through user-definable rules that you have complete control of. Each click is then checked against our click fraud algorithm to determine whether the visitor has malicious intent.
3. Blocking the user
Once a click has been categorised as click fraud, the IP address of that visitor will be inserted automatically into the Google Ads campaigns IP exclusion list. That user will then no longer be able to see your ads or repeat their malicious clicking.
Once this process has been completed and the visitor has been blocked, you can relax knowing that you will no longer be wasting any further money on illegitimate visitors.
You may have heard that Google has its own anti-fraud system but, as the battle against click fraud has been continuing for years, fraudsters are consistently coming up with new ideas and ways to evade detection. Therefore, even Google’s system can be bypassed with the correct programming and knowledge.
Protecting your PPC ads from click fraud has huge benefits and, considering that click fraud is currently growing at 50% per year, it is vital that advertisers take advantage of click fraud protection. It is an increasing problem that affects millions of businesses worldwide and it may even be currently affecting you. This is why we have partnered with Click Guardian to provide our clients with the opportunity to stop their competitors from clicking on ads and wasting their budget.
Want to learn more about our new click fraud service? Get in touch with us today!
