Are you advertising in a very competitive industry? Your campaigns could be impacted by click fraud and your profits.

But first, let’s discuss what click fraud actually means. Google describes click fraud as ‘clicks on ads that Google considers to be illegitimate, such as unintentional clicks or clicks resulting from malicious software.’ Examples include:

• Manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads e.g. competitors

• Clicks by automated clicking tools, robots or other deceptive software

• Extraneous clicks that provide no value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click

Google tries to work out which clicks are illegitimate or invalid with their internal systems and then remove them from account data and automatically filter them from reports and payments so advertiser’s aren’t charged. If click fraud is not detected by Google, the Google Ads account will be credited.

Why is it a big deal?

The truth is, click fraud happens in almost every industry. 90% of all campaigns on Google Ads are being impacted in some way. Black-hat techniques include buying clicks/website traffic through using bots and web crawlers or click farms to raise competitor costs with little gains.

How can we detect click fraud from our campaigns?

1. Check IP addresses

Google doesn’t offer any tools to check IP addresses that have visited your website but there are tracking tools and plug-ins out there so you can see how many times the same IP address is used over a specific date range. If you notice the same random location or IP address visiting your website often, then this is a red flag 🚩and should be blocked. 

1. Check publishers

The most common form of ad fraud where users are directed from your ads to a dodgy-looking website. Check your placements on Google Ads and sort by high traffic. If any placements look ‘off’, you can add them as negative placements to block them from your publishers list.

Watch out for websites that are filled with ads and very little or no content at all. Recently registered domains are also a big giveaway.

1. Monitor campaign activity

Advertisers monitor campaign performance regularly anyway but if you see a significant spike in click traffic or engagement with your ads at an unusual time of the ad, this may be click fraud.

If this does happen, review your location performance as well to see if the high click through rate is from a location not associated with your audience targeting. This could be an indicator that you’ve been the target of a click fraud campaign.

What else can we do?

Monitoring IP addresses and placements are more reactive solutions rather than proactive. To get ahead of the curve on click fraud, advertisers can invest in click fraud software which automatically detects potential invalid click activity and blocks them from the account. The software learns about your website traffic and can detect new threats and adapt it’s algorithm.