Anyone Advertising on Google may have been the victim of click fraud without even knowing it and maybe costing your business hundreds and thousands of dollars every month. In this article, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about click.
What is click fraud?
Click Fraud is simply a technique when a person or computer clicks on a pay per click advertising in an attempt to waste the company’s online budget and prevent their ads from appearing in the search engine results page. Google refers to this as invalid clicks; their definition is manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads clicks by automatic clicking tools, robots or other deceptive software.
Click Fraud
Also, the clicks that provide no value to the advertiser, such as the second click or double click.
According to click fraud statistics, an estimated $27.2 Billion was lost due to click fraud in 2018. This is an increment of sixty-two per cent over $16.7 Billion in 2017.
Google Fraud is broken down into three areas of bots, click-farms, and competitors.
Bots – At least 40 percent of the Internet traffic is non-human which we call them as a bot (Robots). Some of these click bots are designed to commit PPC click frauds as well.
Click Farms – These are our software programs that are used by our competitors to automatically click on your ads to do the same activity as of Bots. Recently, ABC news cover-up buying a click farm at Avery discovered in China.
Competitors – With competitors, these are people who are competing against you in the ad auction. And those individuals who are manually clicking on you AdWords to finish up your budget and remove your business from appearing on Google.
How to check your account for click fraud?
From the research conducted by Moz, more than 80% of search results contain Google ads. With the growing range of Ads, the risk of click fraud is growing as well.
The AdWords advertisers think that Google will protect their ad account from click frauds and ignore the warning signs. Google doesn’t provide perfect security to the click fraud, which puts the business of advertisers at risk.
Here are some effective techniques to check and eliminate the click fraud from your ads.
Frequently Monitoring
You need to check the Google analytics stats regularly if possible then check the stats daily. This will make sure that your ads are running perfectly. And if any issue arrives, then you can know immediately without loss of time. Because time is money in the case of Google ads.
Frequently Monitoring
If you notice any odd patterning like an instant change of stats in a short period of time but your conversions are not increasing, then you may have been the victim of Click fraud. It may occur on Google analytic stats, your sudden spike of CTR (Click-Through-Rate), etc. Likewise, if you are getting traffic from some specific website, then that’s not a good sign.
Automatic Ad Fraud Detection
Checking ad fraud manually might take a long time and complexity that is why there is a better option that detects an ad fraud automatically without your effort. It is faster and more efficient than the manual way of fraud detection. People nowadays are using automatic tools than manual monitoring because it saves time and works more effectively.
It detects the ad fraud on your ads and blocks suspicious users, from visiting your ads and clicking over. PPC Protect is all in one click fraud detection tool that identifies and reduces unwanted clicks. It detects the IP addresses used from VPN, hackers, and spammers that are blacklisted by Google.
Since every problem has a solution, here are some of the best method to stop Google Click Frauds:
Blocking the IPs
Those blacklisted IPs coming from spammers and hackers must be stopped from entering your Google ads. You need to find the list of IP addresses that are frequently visiting your website, which you should perform manually with the help of Google (Platform name IP logs).
IP Blocking
You can also use Tracking Script to track who’s clicking your ads. It provides information like the device, location and IP address of a user. If you find any user that is frequently visiting your ads in a single day, then that could be the sign of your fraud click which you have to remove and get protected from those spammers.
GDN Remarketing Campaigns
This process is really useful to reduce click fraud because your ads will only be displayed to those that have previously visited your website or showed interest on your site. This will keep those unwanted and new users far away from your Google ads because they cannot see your ads. Only to the old and visited original users are shown your ads.
Ad Targeting
Sometime even small things might be the biggest problem solver. Here Ad targeting is one of that thing which every ad manager possesses as a default feature. You can target any location that you desire to publish your ads. If you are getting false traffic from some specific geographical region, then you can exclude that location any time and shift to some better areas.
Google ads targeting
Also, to exclude the click frauds, which you suspect, you can change or remove their zip code, city, country, etc. from your ad manager. For better targeting, apply every possible option like the age groups, location, demographics, interests, behavior, etc. to increase the potential of your ads.
Click Cease
This works by placing a short piece of code within your account settings under the tracking template, then every time your Google ads are clicked on you record all their call details including the IP address, date, time, locations, device and other core metrics to identify each and every clicks. Then if the same user clicks on an advert numerous times on a paid advertising, then the software will bring this to your attention and sent you an email to review. Also, these settings can be fully customized within your account.
Conclusion
Well, I hope reading this article completely had provided you some sort of knowledge on Google Frauds. If you are an victim of Google click fraud then, apply the above solutions and get free of the frauds.