You’ve put in a lot of time and effort to polish your advertising strategy, develop compelling landing pages, and get sales. Now that your ads are online, you have a major problem: people are clicking them repeatedly, but they have no intention of purchasing anything.
While this may sound extreme, advertisers need to know about click fraud prevention since it can affect the performance of their advertising (on a worldwide scale, advertisers lose about $5.8 billion each year due to click fraud).
What Exactly Is “Click Fraud”?
In the context of online advertising, click fraud occurs when an individual or automated system clicks on an ad, button, or link to artificially inflate the platform’s perception of user engagement.
Click fraud can occur in pay-per-click advertising for two reasons:
- The website owner hosting the ad will click the link many times to enhance the amount of money they get from the company.
- There is the risk that a company’s competitors will engage in click fraud to steal some of the company’s marketing dollars.
Click fraud can come from surprising sources, including the company itself. Google and other search engines utilise the click-through rate (the percentage of individuals that visited a site after clicking a link) as a key ranking factor. Business owners may sometimes try to game the system by artificially boosting their click-through rate through click fraud in the hopes that more genuine visitors would discover and visit their site as a result.
It would help if you took precautions to prevent click fraud since it might adversely affect your organisation.
Avoiding Account Deletion Due to Click Fraud
Four best recommendations for click fraud prevention:
- Turn to Facebook/Twitter Ads: Advertise on Facebook and Twitter to avoid dealing with any third-party publishers. This is because your advertising will only appear on these networks. This eliminates a large avenue via which click fraud can occur.
- Exclusion List in Google Ads (formerly AdWords): Once you’ve done your research and found the IP address linked to fraudulent clicks, you may prevent your ad from being shown to that address in the future. To exclude an IP address, click the Settings tab and look for the IP Exclusions section. After that, all you have to do is enter the addresses in question.
- Perform Remarketing Efforts on the GDN: As a publisher, you should use this approach if you are worried about click fraud. Remarketing simplifies avoiding this by limiting ad exposure to those who have already visited and shown interest in the advertiser’s website. Since publishers are blind to the adverts, they are unlikely to be clicked.
- Adjust Your Ad Targeting: Ad targeting adjustments may be all that is needed to eliminate unwanted clicks. Excluding locales and languages may be useful if you believe click fraud emanates from a certain region (typically, “click farms” are located in impoverished nations with cheap labour rates). And if you have reason to believe a rival is engaging in click fraud, you may block their address, city, etc. However, you must ensure that you are not blocking out good traffic in the process. Only exclude these locations if you have solid evidence that the vast majority of clicks from there are false.
Overall, it is to the benefit of advertisers and their businesses to have some click fraud prevention in place. The growth of click fraud at this moment makes prevention difficult without assistance.
If you want your current and future advertising efforts to succeed, you need to invest in fraud detection software to help prevention of click fraud.
