Ever since the dawn of pay-per-click advertising, advertisers have been concerned about PPC click fraud and how to stop it from happening on their ads. Click fraud happens when bots and other automated computer programs or even competitors click on your ads instead of real users. This results in wasted ad spend, inflated ad statistics, and potential damage to your brand if people think you’re paying for clicks that aren’t valuable.
Fortunately, there are several methods that you can use to protect yourself from click fraud and ensure that your campaign doesn’t end up sinking or damaged by fraudulent clicks.
You pay every time someone clicks your PPC ad when you run it on Google or another platform. If you're doing your job right, you should anticipate that a significant portion of those clicks will result in a sale (or whatever your goal is).
But what if individuals begin to click your advertisement with no intention whatsoever of completing a purchase or engaging with your website. You may be paying for false clicks on your ads if humans (or bots) click on them.
In 2022, 1 in 5 clicks on ads were fraudulent. Hence, the search engines have started to take click fraud more seriously, and they have put procedures in place to stop it. It's not a perfect science, and it's still possible that people still randomly click your ads and sap your ad revenue because click fraud is incredibly tough to detect.
Wouldn't it be amazing if your rivals spent a lot of money on something and received nothing in return?
We wouldn't mind if this occurred, of course, but some organizations and people are going above and above to make sure it does.
Your rivals stand to win in two different ways when people click on your ads falsely.
In addition to burning through your daily ad budget considerably more quickly, it means you're paying for clicks that have no possibility of converting. Since their commercials would run later in the day, there will be less competition.
Your ad score may be impacted by these low-quality clicks as well, which would result in less times your ad is shown and a higher CPC.
Click fraud helps your rivals by damaging you, but there's another party in this scenario who stands to gain directly from someone clicking your ad: the publisher.
When you run display ads), the publisher receives a portion of the money you give Google for each click. Greater ad clicks translate into more money for the publisher.
You can prevent your ad from ever being delivered to an IP address associated with fraudulent clicks if you've done your research and found it. All you have to do to create an exclusion is navigate to the Settings tab and scroll down to the IP Exclusions setting. The offending addresses must then be entered, and you're ready to go!
Automated detection systems can identify and eliminate fraudulent clicks in real time, before charging advertisers, utilizing machine learning and sophisticated algorithms. Using fraud prevention tools for your PPC campaigns such as Clickcease could help you save a substantial percentage of your budget and increase your ads’ performance.
Sometimes all it takes to eliminate fraudulent clicks is a minor adjustment to your targeting. It may be helpful to remove certain regions and their related languages if you suspect that click fraud is originating from a particular geographic area (typically, "click farms" are headquartered in poorer countries with low labor costs).
You can also exclude a competitor's zip code, location, etc. if you believe they are engaging in click fraud. One thing to keep in mind is that you must be careful not to reduce BAD traffic while doing this. If you genuinely think that most of the clicks generated in these locations are fraudulent, only select these exclusions.
Statistics show that display ads are considerably more prone to click fraud. This makes sense because publisher click fraud, which doesn't exist with search ads, is an additional component.
However, you may choose how your display ads are shown, and one choice is to concentrate on retargeting.
Retargeting ads are only shown to persons who have already visited your website if you are using them. This implies that the publisher will not be able to view your adverts on their website or continue clicking them.
Compared to PPC ads, social media ads are far less keyword-based. People will have a lot harder time entering a term to find your advertisement as a result.
Because social media platforms like Facebook have access to so much user data, it is feasible to target your audience quite precisely. This lowers the possibility of click fraud and enables you to increase the effectiveness of your paid advertising. The same goes for a platform such as LinkedIn, which is also incredibly suitable for B2B marketing.
Click fraud has become an issue that every advertiser faces at least once while running a PPC campaign. Not only does the budget suffer, but also the overall performance of the campaign. Hence, monitoring your Google Ads account and identifying click fraud is imperative for the success of your campaign.
The process of identifying fraudulent clicks can prove to be tricky at times, so if you need help fixing this issue and adjusting your PPC campaign, feel free to contact one of our senior PPC consultants.