How to Identify Click Fraud Within Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign

What is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is a sort of offense that abuses pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements to make money through forgery or fraudulent clicks on ads.

PPC advertising is a really large industry on the web. It is managed by large networks like Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter and generates billions of dollars annually.

PPC works by a fee being paid when a link or ad is clicked. Typically advertisers (who have something they want to sell) place ads on website operators’ sites and pay the website owner a fixed amount each time the advertisement is clicked.

The advertising networks act as middlemen – the advertiser registers with the advertising network, the network places the advertising on the publisher’s site and when a click happens the advertiser pays the network and the publisher.

Click fraud is the process of clicking an ad for the purpose of creating a charge without having any interest in the matter of the ad.

Money can be made by becoming an affiliate for the advertising networks and by pretending to be a publisher that is certainly putting the ad on their web site.

If a malicious actor can generate clicks on ads and get paid every time a click happens then they can earn money. If they can generate a significant number of clicks without the advertising network recognizing the clicks are deceptive then there is possible to make a large amount of cash. In many ways a botnet is perfect for generating a great number of clicks.

Since the ads are pay per click, you’ve specify a daily budget of, say, $200, which implies that Google keeps track of how many times people click your ads and stops displaying them when your maximum $200 daily spending limit has been reached.

Now your competition, Devilish Devin’s Custom Auto, wants your ad campaign to neglect and his ads to catch all the traffic. None of these are converting customers, obviously, but their clicks accumulate. Within a short time, your daily budget is reached, and now your ads won’t show for the rest of the day.
They have tons of filters to detect invalid action — they look for patterns such as many clicks coming from precisely the same IP address, persistent or duplicate clicking, and also the time of the clicks. Because they’ve been fairly successful tracking and detecting click fraud, it’s far less of the problem today than it was even a couple of years back. However, the problem now is that even though the search engines will credit back the money into your account, you’re still missing out on all of those people that will have seen your advertising.
All of the leading search engines give you reports and means to track your PPC ads’ effectiveness. You tag your pages with code provided by the search engine, and track everybody who comes to your site through a PPC ad – - from clicking the ad to landing on your web site and all the way to exiting. This detail gives you a means to analyze clicks on your own ads. You can watch for click fraud using all these analytics, also.

Here are warning signals to look for that may indicate you’re the victim of click fraud:

Unusual peaks in impressions (amount of times your ad shows on a search results page)
Unusual peaks in the amount of clicks

No escalation in the amount of conversions during peaks in impressions or clicks
Higher bounce rate (amount of people clicking your advertisement and quickly going back to the search results page) during peaks in opinions or clicks If you detect a pattern which could suggest click fraud, you ought to report your findings to Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or to whichever search engine is running your PPC ads. It’s possible that they’ve already identified the same behavior and credited your account for all those clicks. But should they haven’t, they are able to examine their data to determine if it is indeed scam, and will typically credit your account if they discover that it’s.

It’s worth the additional effort to observe for unusual patterns in your PPC analytics. Even in case you’re just getting a couple more clicks than your average at a specific routine time of day, you might notice that you are not seeing any accompanying upsurge in conversions, which could be because of malicious intent. You may not think that there is any click fraud involved, but if every one of those clicks prices more than $ 20, the price may accumulate quickly. It may also deplete your daily ad campaign budget. A little diligence to safeguard yourself from click fraud pays off.