Pay per click is one of the biggest things in the advertising industry today, which is not surprising as it’s a good income source for many sites. However, there is a big threat that advertisers have to deal with in the form of click fraud. This is a kind of internet crime targeted at pay per click ads or advertisements. It generates from a person, computer program or automated script emulating a real web user and clicking on these ads to get earnings for the clicker. If it’s not detected, this action can lead to huge financial losses.

Click Fraud – Ways to Identify It and Reduce Your Advertising Budget

When you are running an ad campaign, you have to be cautious to know if it’s being attacked by click fraud. The following are some of the actions that will help you to identify click fraud:

• A sudden change in a click count that was maintaining a certain level.
• Unexplained traffic inflow for certain terms.
• When there are wide variations showing in the advertising returns from one month, week or day.
• Major differences in terms which are similar such as website designs and website design.
• Abnormal increase in activity.

Preventing Click Fraud to Get More from the Advertising Budget

One of the best ways to prevent click fraud is to know the server logs in order to identify the conversion rate and CTR. A very good conversion tracker can help you to know your ad campaign statistics, but there are also other ways for you to minimize the likelihoods of click fraud.

Here are several points to keep in mind:

1. Hire a Dedicated Professional

First, you should hire a professional PPC service to monitor your marketing campaign on the internet, focusing thoroughly on the website conversion ratios and traffic. For this, you want to look out for any abrupt increase in traffic to website with little or absolutely no spike in the conversion rate.

2. Click Fraud Detection Tools

Another thing is to use a good online marketing analysis tool with the ability to identify and alert you of any potential click-fraud. These tools are designed to use a certain set of variables that can identify and then report any traffic patterns and clicks which seem suspicious, so it will be easier to highlight a fraud.

3. Report to Search Engines

It is also a good idea to report any type of fraudulent activity to the search engines for their professional team to investigate and identify the origins.

4. Target High Value Sites

One other way to minimize click fraud would be to monitor all the places where PPC advertisements are placed and identify websites which are generating good quality traffic. In addition, you could stop low quality content websites and competitors from displaying your adverts. This blocking can be done through the search engine from the PPC administration settings.

5. Your PPC Budget

You can get good traffic when highly searched terms are advertised, but this will also put you at risk for more click fraud exposure. These terms have higher prices, so the chances for click fraud are greater. To best way to prevent this is to advertise terms with low prices and are fairly less competitive.

6. Ban Your Competitor’s IP Addresses

You could also ban certain IP addresses so that they are unable to view your site. However, this method calls for extreme caution as you don’t want to lose potential customers in the process.

Overall, the online advertisement world is very competitive, so it’s important for advertisers to know about click frauds and to monitor their ad campaigns. You can always get help from professionals to make sure that your ad money is not wasted if you don’t have the energy and time to look out for click fraud activities.