We live in the era of digital marketing, and PPC (pay-per-click) ad campaign is an essential part of the marketing strategy. However, click fraud has become a major concern for businesses as this practice can cost your money and customer. Unfortunately, no company is safe from click fraud regardless of their business size or Google Ads budget. Therefore, you must fight against it with a click fraud protection service to make your PPC ad campaign profitable and achieve your business growth. Read on to understand the basics of click fraud and how it hampers your business. Also, this article will focus on what you should do to prevent this incident.
What Is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is an intentional fraudulent activity linked to PPC ads. It refers to illegally clicking on an ad done to exhaust a company’s advertising budget. Its target is to repeatedly click on a PPC ad to generate fraudulent costs to the company without any intention of purchasing. Remember that click fraud is different from invalid clicks done by the host or publisher of the ad. Instead, this malicious practice has no potential to result in a sale. Moreover, this fraud increases advertising costs, offers incorrect user data, and reduces conversion rates.
How Does Click Fraud Harm Your PPC Campaign?
Some of you may not be aware of the damage that click fraud can cause to your business. For them, here is how click fraud affects your ad campaign.
1. Unnecessary Charges
The most detrimental and visible effect of click fraud is the falsified charges your company has to bear due to fraudulent clicks on your ads. It may even end up draining all of your budget for the PPC campaign.
2. Providing Flawed Business Insights
Exhausting the current budget with falsified charges is not the only way click fraud will cost your company. It also offers counterfeited marketing data that you use to make data-driven decisions. This misrepresented data often has a negative impact on campaign metrics as it navigates your future strategy towards the wrong path.
3. Exhausting Future Ad Budget
Needless to say that click fraud will make you run out of budget for your current advertising campaign. Apart from this, it will offer you counterfeit data and influence you to change your marketing strategy. As a result, this distorted data will also result in a wastage of future spending.
4. Making Your Campaign Reach Daily Limit
Often companies place a daily limit on PPC ad clicks. When you have a click fraud active, your campaign will reach the limit in no time without even benefiting your business from any aspect. Furthermore, once your limit is up, the ads of your competitor will surface in that place. As you can see, without a click fraud protection service, this activity will have a long-term effect on your company’s growth and ROI.
Tips and Tools for Click Fraud Protection
Click fraud is on the rise and has the potential to harm your company badly. Enterprises should make use of the following tips and tools to prevent it:
1. Observe User Behavior
Monitoring the click you get for your ads is an excellent way to discover click frauds. You can track if the suspicious clicks are generated from the same ISP to know if the clicks are fraud.
2. Use Apps to Produce Referral Reports
Know about referral sources by using related apps. These tools will help identify if your website is getting a suspicious number of visitors from any content-targeted websites.
3. Set Variable Ad Prices
While setting prices on your ads, make sure to use different prices on different websites. Thus, you can limit the amount of money you have to pay for a single ad.
4. Monitor the Competitors
Are your competitors trying to cost you money through click fraud? You can know that by using different tools to generate reports containing unique and total clicks.
Use Software for Click Fraud Protection Service
Besides the methods mentioned above, you can also use click fraud prevention software to detect suspicious or malicious activity and automatically block traffic sources. Here is a list of best tools for click fraud protection services:
ClickCease
ClickCease protects your Google Ads campaign against click fraud by blocking fraud clicks and excluding suspicious IPs in real-time. Hence, you will notice a boost in your ad campaign results and get more traffic to your website without harming your budget. This tool is quite easy to set up, and you can block all harmful sources, including bots, competitors, click farms, brand haters, and accidental clicks on mobile devices. You can also generate reports without hassle if you need to show them to your team lead or clients. You also get to control how long an IP should stay blacklisted or whitelisted. ClickCease lets you outsmart the fraudsters by features like Geotargeting, device detection, and custom thresholds. With its reporting dashboard, companies can easily monitor their campaign health.
ClickGUARD
ClickGUARD is the tool that offers complete protection against all kinds of unwanted clicks. It also lets online advertisers have complete control over the paid traffic by preventing wasteful, fraudulent ad clicks. If you want to have a better understanding of the non-profitable clicks, you can opt for this click fraud protection. This tool can detect IPs using VPN and block them automatically. It can also block all the IP addresses that a unique device might use. Whether it is bots, crawlers, spam-bots, malware, or spyware responsible for ruining your campaigns, ClickGUARD can detect them and even categorize them as low, medium, and high level. You can also enjoy the granular customization feature of the tool that ensures ease of use.
Protect360
Protect360 is a powerful click fraud protection software that monitors who comes to your website by clicking on the Google PPC ad. This tool aims to block the fraud clicks and ensure that your website gets organic traffic from the ad campaigns. It is particularly designed for mobile ad fraud prevention. The PPC advertisers will highly benefit by using this high-functional tool. By safeguarding your website from real-time frauds and bots, it lets you gather reliable insights on website traffic and ad campaigns through various metrics. This tool uses a multi-layered approach to save your budget from being used for click fraud. Moreover, it offers cluster analysis, post-attribution fraud detection, validation rules customization, and in-app fraud rules features.
Clixtell
If you are looking for a trustworthy, robust, and automated click fraud protection service, Clixtell is your go-to option. It keeps your designated budget for Google Ads and Bing Ads secure by preventing click fraud activities in real-time. This easy-to-use software helps you get the maximum out of your campaign by blocking competitor or bot clicks that waste your money. It also has a simple integration system. You will be able to understand the actual flow of visitors through the click analysis feature. You can even get an elaborated report to prove invalid clicks if you want to get a refund from Google. Moreover, it supports tracking and recording click-to-call ads. From this feature, local businesses running campaigns for calls can get benefited.
TrafficGuard
TrafficGuard offers click fraud protection with its three layers of defense. Companies, apps, ad agencies, and ad networks can use it to save their ad expense from fraud and invalid traffic. Besides PPC, this tool is equally effective in campaigns such as CPM, CPI, CPE, and CPA. This click fraud protection platform has an enriched database of fraudulent IPs and malicious sites, which it uses to detect and analyze clicks on your ads to block non-human activities. Thus, you get a complete and accurate view of campaign performance. Since TrafficGuard keeps fraud ad clicks at bay, all you get is clean performance data, which will help you make quick decisions and focus on activities beneficial for ROI and business growth.
Singular
If you want to say goodbye to click frauds, using the Singular tool is an ideal choice for your business. This click fraud protection service protects you against frauds of the dynamic ecosystem using various prevention methods. Therefore, you can keep your campaign budget focused on real users. Its automatic fraud detection and prevention system applies real-time deterministic rules. Therefore, the tool blocks installs ahead of attribution by the ad provider like Google Ads. Singular’s click fraud protection system includes Android and iOS install validation, suspicious IP blacklisting, and click-injection prevention on Android. It also employs deterministic methods like geographic outliers and time to install monitoring to block malicious click attribution. Specially designed for mobile fraud ad detection, this tool always stays ahead of the ad fraudsters, even with the evolving attack techniques. Moreover, you can avoid misreporting, thanks to its pre-attribution fraud rejection.
PPC Protect
With the help of the automatic IP blocking technology of PPC Protect, you can get effective click fraud protection round the clock. Thus, it assists you in staying ahead of your competitors by removing click fraud across all channels. It also has the option to customize the service for any particular niche or industry. Besides, you can use it to protect multiple domains and permit its access permission to multiple users. PPC Protect gathers data on click fraud and invalid traffic and uses these insights to create a layer of protection in all channels. You can set traffic filters to choose which traffic to exclude from ad campaigns on this tool.
Beacon
Using the click fraud protection service of Beacon, you can stay away from fake clicks and impressions on various ad campaigns such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. It helps you achieve an enhanced campaign performance, waste less budget, and reach more people. This platform works across various search and social channels to block bots on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook, and Instagram while improving campaign ROI at the same time. As its smart technology blocks all fake traffic, you get more human visitors to your website. It also ensures transparent and accurate campaign data. It not only shows you the actual status of your campaign but also helps you build better ad strategies for the future.
Fraud Blocker
Fraud Blocker lets you block fraud, increase conversion and save money with its industry-leading click fraud protection tool. Besides, it also improves the quality of service you get. Once you integrate it with your website and connect with your Google Ad account, it can seamlessly catch fraudulent ad clicks and block them in real-time from showing. Thus, you can reach potential customers and get more leads. Its algorithm not only analyzes your ad traffic but also offers scores to each user depending on aspects such as device fingerprint, click frequency, IP address, VPN, invalid clicks, geolocation, and blacklist. It automatically adds malicious and suspicious IP addresses into an exclusion list. Also, you can customize some fraud detection rules on this platform, including VPN thresholds and click frequency as your choice.
Click Guardian
Click Guardian is a top-notch click fraud protection service that safeguards your Google Ads against people, competitors, and bots clicking on your ads only. Besides tracking down the fraudulent activities, it also stops them automatically. This tool monitors every click your ads receive and gathers information about the user interaction with the ads. While doing so, Click Guardian uses robust technology to distinguish between real potential customers and fraudsters. Once it detects a click fraud, it hides the ad from the fraudster. This platform shields your campaign 24/7, so you can always stay protected from any real-time threats. Click Guardian can track the digital footprint of the users using its Device Fingerprint feature. It can also block them during their attempt to change IP addresses. Even if someone tries to click fraud using VPN, proxy, or Tor browser, it can detect and block them immediately.
Conclusion
When a company runs PPC ads online, they have to pay for every single click made on their advertisements. While these ads aim to get more traffic and conversion for your business, click fraud can spoil it without your knowledge. The number of click fraud incidents is on the rise globally, and you need to employ all the preventive measures to eliminate such threats. After reading this article, now you know the best tools to remove click fraud from PPC campaigns. Choose any solution from the list so you can avoid any fraudulent activities around your ad drives and get quality traffic that has the potential to convert. To safeguard your online business, you should also use fraud detection and prevention tools.
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