How to Prevent Click Fraud on Your PPC Ads

You’ve put a lot of time and energy to perfect your ad campaign, creating funnels, landing pages, and winning sales/driving leads. Your ads have just gone live, but there’s one big problem: People are out there clicking your ads over and over with absolutely no intention of buying anything.

It sounds crazy, but click fraud is something advertisers should be aware of. Advertisers lose around $5.8 billion a year globally, and it can make a huge difference in the success of your PPC campaigns.

What Is Click Fraud?

Let’s dive a little deeper into what Click Fraud is. When you run a PPC ad on Google or any other platform, you pay every time someone clicks your ad. If you’re doing your job well, you should expect a good number of those clicks to convert into a sale or lead.

For mobile ads on Google, the average conversion rate is 3.48 percent, so you might reasonably expect to make three sales for every ten clicks you get. What happens if people start clicking your ad with absolutely no intention of making a purchase or engaging with your site, though?

This is what’s known as click fraud, and it is a BIG problem for advertisers today.

If people (or bots) are fraudulently clicking on your ads, then it can mean you’re paying for clicks that aren’t real. This can use up your daily ad spend, meaning you never reach your target audience with your message.

Click fraud is something the search engines have begun to take more seriously, and they have put systems in place to combat it. The problem is click fraud is very difficult to spot, so it’s not a perfect science, and it’s very well possible people are out there clicking your ads and using up your daily ad budget.

Types of Click Fraud

Click fraud is very simple: Someone clicks on your PPC ads with the intention of costing you money. Why are people doing this and what’s in it for them?

There are two main types of click fraud.

Click Fraud by Competitors

Wouldn’t it be great if your competitors spent a whole load of money on something and got nothing in return?

Of course, we wouldn’t mind if this happened, but some companies and individuals are taking things a step further by ensuring this happens.

Your competitors stand to gain from fraudulently clicking your ads in two ways.

Firstly, it means you’re paying for clicks that have no chance of converting, and secondly, it means you’re blowing your daily ad spend much more quickly. This means there’s less competition for when they run their ads later in the day.

These low-quality clicks may also impact your ad score, meaning your ad gets shown less often and your CPC goes up.

Click Fraud by Publishers

Your competitors benefit from click fraud by hurting you, but there’s also another player in this equation who stands to benefit directly from clicking your ad: the publisher.

If you’re running display ads (ads on third-party websites), then the publisher gets paid a percentage of what you pay Google for each click. More clicks on your ads equals more revenue and money in the pocket of the publisher.

How to Tell If Click Fraud Is Affecting Your Website

To tell if you’re experiencing ad fraud, you need to see what’s happening once people click your ads, and where those clicks are coming from. To do this, you need to collect:

• IP addresses
• click time stamps
• action time stamps
• user-agent

This information will help you to identify large numbers of clicks that might be coming from the same person without ever leading to action.

If you see lots of clicks from the same IP address, where there’s a click time stamp, but no action time stamp, then it might raise some suspicion. 

If you do have suspicions, then it’s always worth contacting Google and reporting the issue so they can look into it further. As always, the clues are in the data, so if you’re experienced with PPC and something seems off with your numbers, then it’s always worth investigating.

5 Steps to Prevent Click Fraud

Click fraud can be difficult to detect, but there are some steps you can take to help prevent it. There’s no surefire way of eliminating click fraud, but if you’re make it a priority, then you can limit its impact.

Here are five steps you can take to limit the impact of click fraud on your PPC ads.

1.Set Up IP Exclusions in Google Ads

If you’ve been through your data and decided that certain IP addresses are clicking your ads fraudulently, then you can block them through Google Ads. This will mean your ads aren’t shown to the IP addresses you’ve identified as fraudulent.

In your Ads account, go to the settings tab and choose IP exclusions.

Google provides a step-by-step process to exlcude IP address. 

2. Think About How You Run Display Ads

According to PPC Protect, display ads are much more susceptible to click fraud. This makes sense because you’ve got the added element of publisher click fraud, which isn’t present with search ads.

You have control over how your display ads are shown, though, and one option is to focus on retargeting.

If you’re running retargeting ads, then they’re only visible to people who have visited your website in the past. This means the publisher won’t be able to see your ads on their site and isn’t able to keep clicking them.

Retargeting is an excellent way of targeting your audience at different stages of the customer journey, and it also has the added bonus of making it more difficult to click your ads fraudulently.

3. Concentrate on Ad Targeting

The more targeted your ads are, the more successful they’re likely to be. It’s also likely to make them less susceptible to click fraud.

Many of the click farms are concentrated in specific locations (generally low-income countries), so you might limit your risk by excluding these countries (and languages) from your targeting.

You want to get your ads in front of people who will take action, so it’s important you’re targeting your ads toward your audience. Not only might focusing your attention on a smaller geographic area make your ads more effective, but it might make it more difficult for people to click them fraudulently.

Again, this isn’t a science, and it’s very difficult to stop click fraud completely (if Google could, it would), but by following good PPC steps, you can improve your ROI while protecting yourself at the same time.

4. Focus on Social Media Ads

Social media ads are much less keyword-based than paid ads on search engines. This makes it much more difficult for people to type in a keyword and see your ad.

Platforms like Facebook have so much information on their users, which means it’s possible to be very targeted with the people you reach. This reduces the chance of click fraud and allows you to get a better return on your paid ads.

Unlike with display ads, social media platforms don’t have third-party owners either, so this eliminates publisher click fraud, making your ads that little bit safer.

5. Use Click Fraud Protection Software

There are lots of different providers of click fraud protection services. Companies such as ClickCease, Clixtell, ClickGuard, and PPC Shield monitor your ads using algorithms to detect fraud, quarantining fraudulent clicks.

These solutions tend to cost around $50 a month for a basic package and can save you thousands of dollars a month.

Whether you choose to invest in this kind of protection will depend on the scale of your PPC campaigns and if you think you’re suffering from click fraud. The nice thing is if these platforms work, then you should quickly start to see the results in your data.

You’re not tied in to anything, so it’s worth testing these out and seeing if they make a difference for your campaigns.

tldr; How to Prevent Click Fraud

There are some simple steps you can take to prevent click fraud. This is a complicated issue and no fix is a magic bullet, but these steps can help you spot click fraud on your ads and limit its impact on your PPC.

1. Set up IP exclusions on Google Ads

If you’ve analyzed your data and believe certain IP addresses to be fraudulently clicking your ads, then you should add them to an exclusion list in Google Ads.

2. Think about how you run display ads

A big part of click fraud is publishers clicking on your ads on their websites. If you focus on retargeting with your display ads, then publishers are less likely to see your ads.

3. Concentrate on ad targeting

Focus on your target audiences and tighten your net as much as possible. The more people your ad gets shown to outside of your target audience, the more it’s likely to grab the attention of fraudsters.

4. Consider social media ads

Social media ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are less keyword-focused, meaning they’re harder to search for. With intelligent targeting, these platforms still give you bang for your buck, they’re just harder for fraudsters to find.

5. Use click fraud protection software

If you believe click fraud is costing you big money, then it makes sense to invest in protecting your ads. Softwares like ClickCease are a great way to stop fraudulent clicks.

Conclusion

Click fraud is a complicated issue that could be affecting your PPC ads.

While Google and the other search engines are taking action to prevent click fraud and refund you for illegitimate clicks, it’s not a perfect science. This is why it’s sometimes worth taking a proactive approach to ensure you’re getting the most out of your PPC.

PPC advertising is a very important component of your marketing mix. If you understand the market and follow the above tips, it’s less likely that click fraud will happen to you. If you want more out of your PPC campaigns Swell MKTG is here to help! Swell MKTG is a utah digital marketing agency that specializes in PPC. Swell MKTG is located in the heart of Utah’s Silicon Slopes. We give you the best results all at the best price. Find out why we are Utah’s best ppc agency today!