How to Prevent Click Fraud

If you publish digitally, you may have been stuck with fraud by clicking (and maybe without even knowing). There are ways to spot and prevent this saving grace for advertisers. Thanks to a growing Google effort to eliminate click fraud, it can now be tracked and destroyed in a variety of ways in your Google Ads account, and if everything goes wrong, the software can be used to stop it.

What’s Click Fraud?
Click fraud or “invalid clicking” is used in Google’s terms or earns revenue from a website that hosts an ad when the paid announcement is repeatedly clicked on a website.

How to identify
There is a lot of software for click fraud detection that uses AI and other powerful tricks for automated or bot identification via heuristics and pattern recognition. Complex Algorithms and AI are used to construct mechanical detection systems for detecting and removing invalid clicks before advertisers are charged. By evaluating the signs of click fraud and assisting in the automatic blocking of fraudulent clicks, AI saves you money and time.

Why It’s Important to Eliminate Click Fraud?
Click fraud is the illegal clicking on PPC ads to exhaust the advertiser’s budget. This could result from other people, an automated script, or a computer program posing as a legitimate interested user, clicking on paid search ads without intending to buy what they offer. It is very important to detect and eliminate such click frauds because they can hurt your campaigns and not get your desired results.

Five Steps to Prevent Click Fraud
Follow these five unique steps to prevent your campaigns from click fraud:

1. Monitor your metrics thoroughly
   Be cautious of abrupt increases in campaign activity and ad budget. This is particularly suspicious if your ad data do not match your current PPC approach. Another red flag is a very high bounce rate of over 70%. It could be an indicator of fraudulent clicks if many users close a page after only one visit.
2. Be aware of your competitors
   With the ability to devastate advertising budgets, it’s clear to see how click fraud provides competitors a leg up. Always keep an eye on who is competing in the search engines for your keywords. Use Google to look up the keywords you’re thinking about targeting and see if any other businesses are running ads for them.
3. Look at your traffic sources
   To check for suspicious activity, you can view the IP address information of your ad clicks. Repeated clicks from areas where you don’t do business are one of the most apparent symptoms of click fraud.
4. Only high-value sites should be targeted
   Click fraud is rampant on low-quality websites. They’re frequently linked to bots that target your site and adverts automatically. To avoid this, only place your adverts on sites you know have many potential customers.
5. Invest in anti-fraud software
   Finally, the most effective strategy to combat click fraud is investing in a software solution specifically intended to fight it. Bot Management and software can assist you with click fraud.

Final Word
Click fraud and advertisements are unavoidable aspects of advertising that we must tolerate. It’s up to you to take control so that your ad budget isn’t drained. Take steps to prevent fraud on your adverts if you detect it. Avoid nations with a high rate of click fraud, and block any IP addresses acting suspiciously in response to your adverts. If you’d like to talk to us about robust ad fraud protection for your marketing funnel, book your free consultation today