Everything You Need to Know About Click Fraud Detection

If you are planning to invest in PPC advertising to reach your target market faster, first of all, you need to be wary of the most intermediating issue that is plaguing the digital advertising industry for the last few decades known as click fraud.

What is click fraud?

The deceptive objective of click fraud entails clicking on PPC ads with the motive to boost website revenue alternatively exhausting the budget of an advertiser. The fraudulent practice has been a scare because it not only increases the cost of advertising but equally skews the value of your analytical data by making them meaningless.

As reported by the University of Baltimore, click fraud has cost advertisers around $24 billion in 2020. So, making a plan beforehand by understanding the vulnerable areas will help you to take the best measures for click fraud detection and prevent your business from potential loss. In the article let’s understand who is more likely to commit click frauds, the signs that help to detect them, and your preventive steps.

Who Can Involve in Click Fraud

The major vulnerable areas that are identified include

Publishers – Owners of the website can involve in click fraud. They can do it manually as well as system-based bots by clicking on the ads displayed on their specific websites to generate more revenue.

Competitors – Another susceptible area is your competitors.  They might be involved in click fraud to disrupt your business by enhancing your advertising costs and equally exhausting your budget for advertisement.

Affiliates – To get credit against more and more clicks, many affiliate networks may involve in the activity on regular basis. Consequently, you may face a scary situation especially if you are fooled by the network people who are conducting business with you.

Consumers –The chances of consumers committing click fraud compared to publishers and competitors is quite less. However, under some circumstances, their disappointments with your services may encourage them to click on your ads to cause your business to face financial loss.

Types of Click Fraud

Your business can experience two types of click frauds, either manually or through automated systems. Manual click frauds are chiefly done by click farms that employ a team of people for clicking on ads. However, they can also use specialized software known as click bot and designed for the purpose of clicking on the ads as they are instructed.   

Typical Signs of Click Frauds?

To prevent your business from clicking fraud detection is the first step. Check out the two most common indications of possible click frauds.

A strange spike in traffic rate – make sure to research the analytics of your website and evaluate if you get clicks frequently having the same IP address. This is a major sign of click fraud.

A sudden increase in CTR rate – Any abrupt increase or drop in CTR is indicative that there has been click fraud. Also, make sure to check the time between the clicks and conversion.

Steps to Detect Click Fraud

•    Be practical and proactive to prevent you from click fraud while continuous research and analysis of your website analytics is the best way to understand the performance of your ads and equally identify click fraud that could damage your business.

•    If you identify certain IP addresses that are clicking frequently and you suspect committing fraud, an effective way is to stop your ads from being shown especially on those IP addresses by means of the IP exclusions feature in Google Ads. Once done, these ads will no more be displayed on those devices with that IP addresses.

•    Adoption of this highly advanced polygraph device is a great way to prevent your business from facing loss and leverage the best outcome of your Paid advertisements on Google, Facebook, and web pages. This advanced tool employs high-tech cybersecurity mechanisms and effectively helps eliminate or block all sorts of invalid or fraudulent clicks.