Is your PPC budget evaporating faster than usual? If the answer is yes, you may be experiencing click fraud.
Click fraud is when people or computer scripts falsely inflate the number of clicks on a PPC ad. It’s usually carried out by businesses trying to sabotage their competitors by making them hit their budget earlier than expected.
Not only can click fraud drive up your PPC costs, but it can prevent your advert from being shown at peak times and skew your conversion rates.
It’s a serious matter, with a staggering $24 billion lost to click fraud last year!
Click fraud is something that PPC platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising try and prevent through the use of complex algorithms – refunding ad credits to customers if fraud is identified. However, their systems aren’t 100% reliable, and it’s always wise to take steps across your own accounts to stop it from happening.
Here are some of the ways you can avoid click fraud.
Tweak Your Targeting
You can decide which target audiences you want to serve your ads to, from age all the way through to household income. Sometimes making small amends can help eliminate fraud entirely.
For example, if you are concerned that a rival company is clicking on your ads, you can exclude their location or IP address if you have it. If you are worried that your ads are being fraudulently clicked on by click farms in other countries, you can block those countries from seeing your ads.
It goes without saying, do be careful when adjusting your targeting. You don’t want to stop serving your ads to genuine customers.
Regularly Update Negative Keywords
Having an up-to-date list of negative keywords for each ad group will not only help ensure your ad gets served to the right target audience but will help reduce the risk of click fraud too.
The more relevant words in your negative keyword list, the less chance your competitors get access to your ad. Your negative keyword list isn’t made available to anyone else, so your rivals will not know which words to use to make your advert appear.
Check into your account every couple of days and see what words and phrases people are using to view your ads. You can then exclude keywords as appropriate.
Use a Specialist Service
If you have many accounts to monitor or just don’t know where to begin when it comes to managing click fraud, your best bet is to use a specialized detection and monitoring service. This service will monitor and track all of your PPC traffic on your behalf, identifying patterns and potential fraudsters.
ClickReport is a state-of-the-art system that will alert you to all potential click abusers. We can even serve a popup ad on your website to deter visitors who repeatedly click on your ads!
Want to see how much money you can save on your PPC advertising by eliminating click fraud? Sign up for your free trial today!