You’ve put in much effort to refine your marketing campaign and produce actionable landing pages and immediate purchases. Your advertising has just gone online, but there’s one major issue: people are clicking on them repeatedly with no intention of purchasing anything; here comes the click fraud protection for your help.
It may seem dramatic, but click fraud is something advertising should be aware of since it costs advertisers $5.8 billion each year worldwide, and it may affect the performance of your commercials.
What exactly is click fraud?
When a human or a bot clicks on an ad, button, or hyperlink, the platform is tricked into believing there is more engagement than there is.
Click fraud may occur for one of two reasons:
- The website owner who hosts the ad will continually click on the link to raise the amount of money the company must pay them.
- A rival may use click fraud to siphon funds from the company’s marketing budget.
Surprisingly, click fraud is occasionally committed by the firm itself. To establish search ranks, search engines such as Google depend on the click-through rate or how many people visited a site due to a specific link.
A company owner may try to defraud the system by increasing the number of clicks via click fraud and climbing up the search engine rankings so that more real people locate and visit their page.
Any click fraud may be detrimental to a company, so you should safeguard against this unlawful conduct.
How does click fraud work?
Large-scale click fraud is often carried out by automating the process via a bot or software that impersonates a real visitor to a website. The purpose of the bot is to trick the platform into thinking it is a person who plans to purchase whatever the ad is selling by clicking on the ad repeatedly.
A click fraud victim may notice many clicks coming from a single computer. Advertising networks and advertisers may see this traffic as suspicious due to the high volume of hits.
However, dishonest individuals may get around this restriction by directing bot traffic over a virtual private network (VPN) with dynamic Internet Protocol addresses (VPN). They may even conduct click fraud by using many computers located in different geographic areas to avoid being discovered.
It’s possible that the fraudsters would undertake a fraud campaign in which the ad will be posted on websites specifically designed for that purpose rather than showing the ad on respectable websites. A website like this is very unlikely to get any real organic traffic given that there is no substantial material for the visitors to consume.
Once the advertisement has been placed, bots generate enormous volumes of invalid traffic and fraudulent clicks. The fraudster will then send an invoice for these activities to the owner of the affiliate program.
In addition, malicious organizations may make it seem like a publisher is clicking on its advertisements to generate money. This is done in order to bring about the termination of the advertising network’s relationship with the newspaper in question.
Click fraud is a widespread occurrence. According to a recent University of Baltimore research, click fraud will cost advertisers more than $35 billion by 2020.
Google and other search engines have implemented policies to safeguard companies against click fraud.
While it’s encouraging to know that Google is keeping an eye on your business, you should still take active measures to protect it, even if they are doing so. The first strategy involves making advertising that is more difficult for con artists to target.
Consider devoting more funding to social media advertising that is less keyword-focused and hence more difficult to find.
You may also focus more on your chosen audience, reducing your chances of meeting click fraud. Being more particular about the geographic places your adverts target and avoid may also give an extra layer of click fraud prevention.
Next, you may prevent click fraud by regularly monitoring your advertising and advertising expenditures. If you’ve identified fraudulent clicks from certain IPs, Google Ads allows you to block those IP addresses so that click fraud protection can be done easily. When you suspect fraud, swift action is required.
