Search engine marketing click fraud gained a good deal of notoriety a couple years ago when it was determined that many companies budgeting marketing dollars for pay-per-click campaigns were getting less than their money’s worth.
In fact, some experts believe that nearly 25% of the dollars spent on a PPC campaign could be due to click fraud.
The best offense is a good defense. Take steps now to ensure that you are doing whatever you can to Reduce Click Fraud.
Keep An Eye On Your Account
There are many software tools available to help you identify when click fraud is occurring, but it is usually worthwhile to start looking for it yourself with these simple tips:
• Watch for spikes in traffic in association with a decrease in the conversion rate. Consider your normal averages as a baseline.
• Look at the list of IP addresses for clicks. Sort them so that you can easily see the duplicates.
• Use separate landing pages for each search engine, and for each account and use the referrer information reporting available.
Advanced Methods To Reduce Click Fraud
If you can spend a bit more time and money on determining if click fraud is a problem with your advertising campaign, consider these additional tips that will help to Reduce Click Fraud:
• Block domains from known offenders. This is an option with both Yahoo and Google PPC campaigns. With Google Adwords you can also prevent your ads from appearing in entire channels, such as parked domains. If you are partnering with smaller search engine companies, utilise Whois or Reverse IP to find the registrant of the domain where the fraudulent clicks are originating.
• Keep your advertisements confined to appearing in countries that your company serves via geo-targeting. If you do find traffic from other countries, this could be a warning sign.
• Use the major search engines for your PPC campaign. The bigger engines have more tools and more ways to monitor your account. Traffic from lesser known sites is also of lesser quality.
• Consider downstream distribution partners. Most fraudulent activity will not come from the PPC account company, but from those smaller distributors at the bottom. Tag your tracking strings correctly to identify where the clicks are coming from.
• Consider lower cost keywords. The higher priced keyword advertising campaigns tend to experience the highest rate of click fraud.
• If you want to feel more secure about stopping or reducing click fraud, consider purchasing one of the software programs currently available that will do all the monitoring for you.
Click fraud does nothing more than up the price of certain keywords and cause legitimate companies to lose money on their PPC campaigns. Carefully monitor your accounts and activities will help to Reduce Click Fraud and save you money with online advertising.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Sean,
This is all excellent advice. I’ll be implementing your suggestions when I start my PPC campaign soon. Do you have any preferences for the software to help me monitor my account?
Loads of options available Jazz, try searching “click fraud software” on Google.
This is most important to do
I read another post on a similar subject and one of the commenters said that she decided not to tell her friends and family this time, as previous to this on her last PPC campaign they were giving her clicks thinking that they were helping her to make money but they got her into trouble instead.
A couple of steps to reduce click fraud would then be not telling your friends and family or if you do, explain how detrimental it is for your online reputation.
A friend of mine was recently banned based on Google’s assessment that she was involved in click fraud. She was totally innocent and could prove it – but Google doesn’t listen and there is no mechanism for appeals or re-dress.
And, they didn’t just ban the site in question, but all her accoiunts and they owed her significant revenue which they won’t pay out.