The 5 Best Methods for Preventing Click Fraud

Click fraud—a financial detriment to your online marketing budget—is a threat to the growth of your company. Imagine this: 50% of your ad budget is lost to fraud. That's like throwing half of your money in the garbage. This isn't farfetched; and many companies are typically losing between 20% and 60% of their total ad budgets to bots, non-human traffic, and competitor clicks - even when buying from the most reputable traffic sources.

You don't have to let this happen. Click fraud can be minimized as long as you take action again it. In this article, we're going to discuss 5 actionable ways in which you can mitigate and prevent click fraud.

5 Tricks for Managing Click Fraud:

• Measure your advertising results
• Read up on your competitors
• Include advertising on social media
• Handpick the websites your ad runs on
• Monitor traffic with a click fraud prevention service

Measure Your Advertising Results

How are you supposed to know if you're a victim of click fraud? You should first have a baseline knowledge of your online marketing results. How many conversions do you get per $500? What about $1,000? Track your progress and your results. You need to know what your results are before you can catch any major changes.

One month your company will attract 10 new clients. Another month, only 2 new clients may appear. Why? Let's say your marketing budget and the economy stayed the same. What changed? Situations like this will cause you to be suspicious. Upon further review, you may learn that your "clicks" weren't legitimate; instead, a fraudster has taken action against your company.

If you use Google Ads, you'll want to spend some time in the Campaign Performance and Account Performance areas. These areas will tell you how many clicks are invalid. A sharp rise in invalid clicks indicates your marketing budget is under attack from a click fraudster.

Know Your Competitor

Not every business is ethical. Case in point: An entrepreneur—we'll call him Adam—just created a new local travel website. He notices that a local competitor operates in the adjacent town and is running online ads.

Adam wants business and has a two-pronged approach: First, he'll click on the ads numerous times. Then, once the competitor's ad budget has been diminished, Adam will run his own ads. He knows that he'll have less competition if he's the only one running ads.

Let's say that Adam and his unethical travel business operate out of Beachview, Florida. In Google Ads, you're able to find out the geographical location of invalid clicks. If invalid clicks are coming from Beachview, you'll be able to connect the dots and determine that Adam is committing click fraud.

Try Advertising on Social Media

Fraud often takes place by third-party publishers. With social media, there are no third-party publishers. Facebook and Twitter ads run internally, giving you a better guarantee click fraud won't take place.

If you suspect click fraud may be happening in your online marketing efforts, contact us. In addition, diversify your marketing strategy. Try running ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media websites.

A fraudster like Adam can easily find your Google ad by searching for your company. On social media, however, your ad may not run simply because someone searched for your company. Ads are shown to people based on a myriad of factors related to their interests.

Choose the Websites You Advertise On

Low-quality websites are fraud havens. Bots that are able to execute click fraud are commonplace with these websites. On the other hand, larger websites are safer.

Choosing high-quality websites takes time; however, doing so is an added level of defense against click fraud. It all depends upon what your threshold is when it comes to fraud.

Monitor Your Traffic With a Click Fraud Prevention Service

Your advertising budget is as valuable as the legitimate clicks you're getting. If you're hemorrhaging half of your advertising budget to click fraud, hiring a fraud prevention company will actually save you money.

IPQS anti-fraud tools will put an end to click fraud affecting your business. Our device fingerprinting technology will ensure fraudsters won't be able to spoof their online fingerprint or emulate devices as they target your ads. Low quality connections like proxies and VPNs will also be detected in real-time.

Take a test drive of our services if you suspect click fraud against your company. It's free! And contact us if you'd like to learn more about how we protect your marketing budget from click fraud.