Home Technology How to Protect Your PPC Campaign from Click Fraud

How to Protect Your PPC Campaign from Click Fraud

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PPC campaigns are an important part of digital marketing strategies for both online and offline-based businesses. With the help of Paid-per-click ads, businesses can attract new customers, increase brand awareness, and notify potential customers of seasonal offers and discounts, and much more.

Unfortunately, click fraud has become a real concern because it has the power to render your PPC campaign invalid and incur only losses. No organization is immune to click fraud, regardless of its size or Search Engine Ads spending budget. In order to make your PPC ad campaign successful and accomplish your business growth goals, you must counter it with click fraud prevention solutions.

Continue reading to learn about the essence of click fraud and how it can harm your business. This article will also discuss what you can do to prevent it.

What Is PPC Click Fraud and How Does It Damage Your Campaign

Click fraud is a deliberate fraudulent practice associated with PPC advertising. It means deliberately clicking on ads in order to deplete a company’s advertising budget.

The goal is to continually click on a PPC ad in order to produce fraudulent costs for the company while having no intention of purchasing the advertised product or service.

Keep in mind that click fraud is not the same as incorrect clicks performed by the ad’s host or publisher. Instead, this fraudulent activity has no chance of resulting in a sale. Click fraud raises advertising costs, provides erroneous user data, and lowers conversion rates. In short, it’s a deliberate action against your business and is usually done by competitors.

Some of you may be unaware of the harm that clicks fraud may do to your company. This is how click fraud hurts your advertising campaign.

The most damaging and apparent effect of PPC click fraud is the false charges that your business will bear as a result of fraudulent clicks on the ads. It might even deplete your entire PPC marketing budget if you don’t stop the fraudulent clicks in time.

Falsified charges will not just deplete your company’s present budget. It also provides incorrect marketing data, which you will use to make data-driven decisions (which will be incorrect as a result). Misrepresented data usually has a detrimental influence on campaign metrics since it steers your future strategy in the wrong direction.

Simply put, click fraud will cause you to exhaust your present advertising budget. Aside from that, it will provide you with fake data and affect your marketing plan. This inaccurate data will therefore waste money that could have been spent in the future.

What Are Click Bots?

You’ve probably heard about click bots, but do you actually understand how they work? Bots are estimated to account for approximately 52% of all internet traffic. A major portion of this amount is made up of harmful bots (such as fraud bots).

Click bots are special programs created to perform click fraud. They range from simple ones that visit the site and click on the direct link to sophisticated algorithms that pretend to be real humans and imitate human mouse click activities. The more sophisticated a bot, the more challenging it is to identify it from a genuine user.

Bots are installed across numerous devices, frequently via malware, rather than attempting to generate hundreds of thousands of clicks from a single device with a specific IP address (this bot activity would be obviously suspicious). This means that the device’s owner is fully ignorant of their digital property being abused.

How to Prevent Click Fraud on Your Ads

As you can see, the growing problem of click fraud could cause serious damage to your business. To prevent it, businesses could use the following practical suggestions.

1. Make Your Ads Fraud-Proof

The first approach is to create advertisements that are harder for fraudsters to target. Consider devoting more funding to social media advertising that is not as keyword-focused and hence more difficult for the scammers to find.

You can also be more focused on your chosen audience, which reduces your chances of meeting click fraud. Being more particular about the geographic places your adverts target and avoid can also offer an extra layer of click fraud protection.

2. Study User Behavior

Monitoring the clicks on your advertising is an effective technique to detect click fraud. With the help of PPC click fraud prevention software like ClickReport, you can determine whether or not the fraudulent clicks are created by users coming from the same IP addresses and use the Google Ads IP exclusion tool to ban these IPs from seeing your ads.

3. Create Referral Reports With Software

Using linked apps and click fraud prevention software, you can learn a lot about referral sources. Tools like that will assist you in determining whether your website is receiving an unusually large amount of visitors from certain websites or servers, which could be a pretty sure indication of PPC fraud.

Once you know the sources, you will then be able to easily determine the malicious IP addresses and block them.

4. Establish Variable Ad Prices

When pricing the adverts, remember to utilize various costs on different websites. As a result, you can reduce the amount you pay for an ad.

5. Keep track of your competitors

Are your competitors attempting to defraud you through click fraud? You may find out by using several methods to make reports containing both unique and total clicks.

So, now you have a better understanding of how PPC click fraud works and how to prevent it using behavior analysis, Google Ads, and specialized software.