Click Fraud - How it affects your PPC Campaign
By Nancy T Willy
Definition of Click Fraud
Anytime somebody clicks on a pay per click advertisement with a fraudulent purpose, it is click fraud. The purpose could be
- To make the advertiser lose money
- To help the person providing the media space to earn money
Types of Pay per Click advertisements
In order to give you a background of click fraud, let us look at the two types of pay per click advertisements.
1. Content Ads
These advertisements are displayed on the affiliate sites or partner sites of the PPC Search Engines. Anybody can sign to become an affiliate site of the PPC Search engines, and these affiliates get paid a certain percentage of the money made by the PPC Search Engine on each click. The more number of clicks that a website owner gets on the advertisements displayed on his site, the more money he makes. And this prompts website owners to get clicks on the ads by some fraudulent methods.
2. Search Ads
These advertisements are displayed alongside the search results in the PPC Search Engines. The more the number of clicks on these ads, the more the amount of money the guy who is putting up the ad would lose. A good way to make your competitor lose money!
How to prevent Click Frauds?
Now that you have understand what Click Fraud is and why it is done, let us now look at the methods to prevent clicks frauds on your pay per click campaigns. Below are some effective tools that you can use to prevent click frauds on your advertisements.
1. WhosClickingWho - An effective click fraud prevention tool that pops up at the potential fraudsters computer after he makes 5 clicks in a row. Their tool can keep track of visits from multiple Pay per Click Search Engines to your site and also detect visitors who use multiple IPs.
2. ClickDetective – ClickDetective uses complicated tracking mechanisms to keep a check on return visitors to your website. Any abnormal behavior would be detected and reported. The program also provides tools to do something about the clickfraud at the time it is happening, making prevention more effective.
3. Adwatcher – This program helps you to accurately track your ROI and at the same time monitor and eliminate click frauds. Adwatcher monitors any suspicious activity and keeps the website owner updated using “Fraud Reports”. They also have a tool that would inform the fraudster on subsequent visits that his activity is being monitored and reported to the owner.
4. ClickAuditor – This tool monitors suspicious IPs and their activity on your website. They also have a Geographic reports which keeps track of sudden spikes in traffic from certain geographic areas than what is normal for your website. You could provide them the IPs of your competitors and using these the visits of your competitors to your website would be monitored by this program.
How do you overcome a click fraud?
Let us say, you have become the victim of clickfraud and would like to repair your damage. Most of the Pay Per Click Search Engines would help you by giving you credit for future clicks or by reimbursing the money that you lost, provided you give them sufficient proof of the fraudulent activity on your website.
Provide the PPC Search Engines with reports that you received about the click fraud, the date and time at which it occurred, the specific campaigns that suffered the damage, log information of the IPs that were involved in the click fraud and a detailed explanation of the fraudulent activity.
Take these measures now to keep your Pay per Click Campaign free from any kind of Click Fraud.
What next?
Get in touch with us to know how Nabler can help your PPC Campaign. It would be our pleasure to assist you in making your business succeed.
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