Friday 2 December 2016

Effective Ways to Monitor and Reduce Adwords Click Fraud



If you are a regular user of Adwords then there’s one major thing you need to know: protect yourself from click fraud.

Click fraud can happen in one of 3 ways. The most common one is your competitor or competitors clicking on your Ad multiple times and since the Ads are pay per click this will result in you hitting your daily spending limit. Clicking on the ads multiple times will also result in the costs for that search term going up. So in a nutshell that competitor is pushing you out of the market so that they can overtake you.

This is know as manual click fraud. It's done by real people who are physically clicking through your ads. These people can also use software (aka bots) to click on your ads repetatedly.

1. Watch for Unusual Patterns

You may only be gretting a few more hits a day than usual. If that's the case it can be quite hard to tell if there is fraud going on or not. The key thing to look for is a trend of spend going up while conversions stay static.

It is almost impossible to understand how Google’s click quality team operates and monitors click fraud. Their three tiered system deals with the threat by analyzing invalid clicks, anomalies or investigating your own analysis.

2. Measure True Visitor Engagement

But let’s say that visitor behavior actually represents engagement with the site. In this case, the click fraud problem is still an issue because Google does not measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of a company’s website. In reality, Google cannot detect click fraud at a local, manual level which is impossible.

If after detecting a pattern such as a drop in page views or a higher bounce rate (people quickly going back to the search results page) that may indicate click fraud, as a first step, report your findings to the search engine running your PPC. This will at least, give you some kind of report where Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or whatever search engine running your ads, can at least identify fraud behavior and credit your account for those clicks.

3. Report Your Findings to the Search Engines

In today’s digital world, being a victim to click fraud is very easy and in most cases, the chances are you may not even realise there is click fraud happening in your campaign. Small advertisers and local businesses cannot really quantify the amount they are spending for competitors to click on their ads.
The most responsible thing you can do to protect your business is to check your PPC advertising costs and start monitoring your ad campaigns on a regular basis.

We hope you enjoyed this blog!

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