Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which includes paying publishers—website owners, search engines, or social media platforms—when customers click on your adverts, has been plagued by click fraud since its inception. If your adverts get published on Publisher xyz.cm, for instance, you would – pay Publisher xyz.cm when someone clicks on your advertisement. Also, services like fraud traffic detection makes the marketing experts to prevent their site from such spam.

It’s simple to exploit this method. Click fraud has emerged as a preferred weapon in the toolbox of hackers worldwide as website owners struggle to make money and advertising networks look to capitalise on their websites’ traffic as they will get easily caught with the help of fraud traffic detection.

How to Stop Click-Fraud

You can stop click fraud by following some easy actions. Although there is no quick answer to this complex problem, following these methods can help you identify click fraud in your advertising and lessen its adverse effects on your PPC.

Add IP exclusions to Google Ads.

You can add specific IP addresses to an exclusion list in Google Advertisements if you’ve examined your data and think they are clicking your ads inadvertently.

Examine your display advertising strategy.

Publishers’ clicks on your advertising on their websites make up a significant portion of click fraud. Publishers will be less likely to see your display advertisements if you concentrate on retargeting.

Focus on ad targeting

Try to narrow your focus and target audiences as much as you can. The more people outside – of your intended audience seeing your advertisement, the greater the chance that fraudsters will get drawn to it.

Think about the advertisements on social media

Less keyword-focused social media advertising is more difficult to find on sites like Facebook and Instagram. These platforms are still effective with sophisticated targeting; fraudsters can’t locate them.

Make use of click fraud prevention tools.

It makes sense to invest in ad protection if you think click fraud is costing you a lot of money. Watch your stats and assess whether using protection software boosts your ROAS.

How to Spot Click Fraud

Using a laptop, the user displays pie charts and graphs from a Google Analytics report.

Since it is difficult to determine who is using a computer and their intentions, especially when you have access to simple click data, identifying click fraud can be challenging. Though click fraud may be present, aberrant metrics may be a sign. The following metrics are worth concentrating on:

An IP address

A significant number of clicks originating from the same or a related IP address will indicate that the click fraudster is using the same server for all their clicks.

Click Timestamp:

The timestamp captures the moment that clicks get made. If you detect several clicks with nearly the same timestamp, you may be on the edge of uncovering click fraud.

Actor Timestamp:

This timestamp logs when people interact with your platform, app, or website. Similar to the click timestamp, if there are numerous identical or nearly related action timestamps – click fraud may occur.

Publishers and ad networks frequently examine these analytics to identify fake clicks – they don’t charge you for them. Because of click fraud, a lot of money has got lost.

The PPC advertising sector is still pushing for stricter legislation against click fraud. Additionally, several businesses are coming out with novel ways to spot – click fraud in collaboration with publishers and ad networks.