In the last twenty years, the way we do marketing and advertising has changed drastically. Traditional methods have converted to online methods. Online marketing or advertising gets you closer to your potential customers, makes it possible to target the demographics that are relevant to your business and also enables you to understand your customer behaviour better and with stringent measurement tools in place to track the success of your campaign.
Tweet #digimaddy2013 Tweet #clickfraudinadvertisingIt’s a new world…with new challenges. But just like with any new tools or new discoveries or new methods , there comes with it, potential setbacks and loopholes.
For any company that uses pay per click (PPC) for their ad campaigns, keep a watch out for a devil in disguise called ‘click fraud’. In today’s times of economic uncertainty where every penny has got to be well spent when you want to get the best ROI from your marketing or advertising campaign, click fraud is something you need to watch out for, in order to secure your marketing and advertising budgets. Click fraud opens up a wide canvas for your competitors to adopt unfair practices and can also eat away all your budgets.
What is click fraud? Click fraud is when a pay-per-click advertisement is clicked on by a user with malicious intent, that will falsely inflate the number of clicks on your PPC ad.
Take a look at what some of the top research organizations found:
- Juniper Research estimates that click fraud cost advertisers $42 billion in 2019.
- A study by Forrester found 69% of brands spending $1 million per month reported that at least 20% of their budgets were being lost to digital ad fraud.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that about 28% of website traffic likely came from bots and other “non-human signals”.
Here’s how you can circumvent click fraud:
- Know who your competitors are: keep a close watch on their activity on social media and check if they are clicking on your ads with spiteful intent. Keep a check on what comes up when you search for keywords about your business. You could be alarmed.
- Target reputable sites- where you know you can find your potential customers
- Avoid collaborations with low quality parties
- Track your campaigns closely. Ask yourself if the progress rate tally’s with the goals you defined at the very start of your campaign
- Don’t click on your own ads or encourage your family or colleagues to do so
- Invest in fraud prevention tools
- If you come across a potentially fraudulent site, run a quick check on the IP (Intellectual Property) of the site
- Look out for proxy servers-it’s possible that sometimes your traffic may be coming from the same place
So pay heed to this, remember to keep an eagle eye out for unusual escalations in the number of ad clicks or impressions, and look out for higher bounce rates. Monitor your ad spends versus any invalid activity that you come across, very closely. And it also may be useful for you to check out Google Ads, the largest landscape for PPC marketers, on their stringent controls built on algorithms, to stop fraud.
Follow @digimaddy2013And in case you don’t have the time to check out fraudulent activities yourself, then you could explore some good options for software in the market, that can throw up a fraud report of any suspicious activity.
Click fraud is a part and parcel of advertising. It’s up to you to take the bull by the horns!