One of the biggest issues that scare consumers in general is that of fraud, and while click fraud is not meant to scare you as a business owner, being a victim of click fraud can be a very unpleasant experience. Being aware of the issue is the best thing you can do to protect your business from click fraud without avoiding it altogether. Many businesses don’t even know they are victims. Read on for 4 telltale signs that indicate you might just be a victim of click fraud.
Google Has Stopped Displaying Your Ads
With click fraud, your competitor, site owner or even customers will scour the Internet for your PPC (pay-per-click) keywords of a Google AdWords and then click on their own ads to get their site to rank higher in the search engines.
Since your PPC keywords are pay-per-click Google will stop displaying them once the maximum daily amount of your advertising budget has been attained. This means that your competitor has now pushed you out of the market which will now drain your advertising budget. You can solve this problem by either tracking and reporting fraudulent IP addresses to Google’s support system or hiring a third-party click fraud service to do this manual labor-intensive work for you.
Another solution is to avoid Google AdWords altogether and go the social media route. On social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, use ads to target specific groups of people who cluster around these platforms and topics, which eliminate you from being bombarded by a third-party initiative which just happens to be your competitor, who won’t be able to find any of your ads.
You’re Not Using REAL Threat and Engagement Analytics (Not Google)
You’ll notice after reading this article, that Google is not the most reliable tracking system as far as identifying click fraud behavior. In fact, their support system embeds the threat and engagement analytics into Google Analytics, but you’ll note that a great majority of traffic they bring to advertisers and customers is often garbage. The traffic that you are getting to your business may also just include competitors who are out to sabotage your company and as a result, your business suffers. This is why you need real threat and engagement analytics since Google system is not a 100% reliable one. By optimizing your PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, you can also use real threat and engagement analytics that can also bring real traffic and reduce click fraud behavior.
Your Internal Reports Shows Click Timestamps
In addition to checking the security of your ecommerce systems, the next important thing you’ll want to pay attention to is if a click become a lead and if that lead then becomes a sale. An IP address, click timestamp, action timestamp and user agent are the four most important items you’ll need to identify click fraud behavior.
What’s super crucial is to pay attention to both the click timestamp and action timestamp which shows whether your competitor is in fact, clicking on your ad but not converting. This indicates that fraudulent behavior at the expense of simply clicking on your ads. Again, you can take care of this problem by following up with Google’s support channels or hire a third party Click-fraud service, whose software addresses all the loose ends in the process that Google manages to miss.
Fraudulent IPs Have Not Been Identified and Blocked
One of the more overlooked and important ways to prevent further click fraud is to set up IP Exclusions in your AdWords campaigns. To know whether an IP address that you’ve identified can tell you if that competitor has automatically click on your ad without an intention of buying, but when after identifying those IP addresses, you can also block them from seeing your ad to that IP address in the future. Because there is a maximum number of 500 IPs that Google limits you for each campaign, consider going with a third-party service for a nominal free to identify an even higher number of IPs that you can continue to block off automatically.
In today’s digital world, being a victim to click fraud is very easy and in most cases, you probably aren’t even aware that click fraud is happening with 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 either track your ad campaigns regularly or hire a third-party service to do this labor-intensive job for you.
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