AdWords and Click
Fraud
Click Fraud is the process of people, or sometimes even
software robots, deliberately clicking on your ads with the
intention of driving up your AdWords costs and reducing your
profitability. In the worst cases, fraudulent clicks can blow
your daily budget early in the day so that you get no leads.
Imagine having your budget spent by 10am. Google will simply
stop displaying your ads for the rest of the day leaving you
twiddling your thumbs.
Click Fraud is definitely a problem for AdWords advertisers
- but it is manageable. Don't make the mistake of thinking that
just because there is a problem that the whole system is
bust.
It isn't.
You wouldn't write-off a house that had a draughty
window.
Techniques To Control Click
Fraud
There are a number of things you can do to control click
fraud and here I just want to mention a few of them.
- You should be monitoring your traffic and actively
looking out for fraudulent activity. There are tools
available to help you do this.
- You should be using the tools available within your
AdWords account to block persistently offending IP
addresses. Again, there are tools available to help you
spot persistent fraudsters coming from specific IP
addresses.
- If you do keep finding that your budgets are being
spent early in the day by blatant fraud, try setting up
your campaigns so that your ads are displayed evenly
through the day rather than in an accelerated manner. This
problem is rare but very real, especially if you are in a
highly competitive area where click costs are north of £10
a go: it doesn't take many clicks to burn a big hole in
your wallet and even if Google later on credits your
account, your traffic is probably going to be killed for
most of the day. You may get your money back but you won't
get lost business back.
- Talk to Google. It is very much in Google's interests
that you regard click fraud as a manageable risk because if
you don't, you're going to stop using AdWords altogether. A
reasoned complaint to Google is likely to result in a
reasonable response.
Click
Fraud and AdSense
AdSense click
fraud is a special case of AdWords click fraud. It arises when
an AdSense publisher clicks on ads on his/her own site in order
to inflate earnings. This is contrary to Google's Terms and
Conditions of AdSense but it doesn't stop people doing it.
However, Google has some sophisticated tools that look out for
this and any such activity is highly likely to result in the
AdSense publisher being banned from the system.
As an advertiser it is harder to spot, especially if the
fraudulent clicks are coming from a variety of IP addresses.
However, in some cases it is easy to see with repeated visitors
coming to your site from an IP address that is often located in
a low value economy country.
One way to control this is to remove any offending country
from your geotargeting settings.
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