Digital Tactics #3 | What is click fraud and how can the software help me?

Mark:

What is click fraud? How can i prevent it? And how can click fraud software help me? So when it comes to PPC advertising or Google Ads search campaigns, there are a lot of businesses currently using this particular advertising method currently.

What is click fraud?

Click fraud is the clicks obtained through the search campaign whereby people who aren’t actually, your potential customers or genuine searchers, are actively searching your keywords, seeing the Google Ads pop up on the first page of Google, and then clicking your ads. And because it’s pay-per-click, they know that they’re wasting your budget.

What does Google do about this?

Google essentially has a very basic, in our experience, a very basic layer of protection. They’ll look at the click behavior on the ad and ascertain whether it’s fraudulent. Actually when you optimise your Google Ads campaign, or search campaign, you can actually open up a column that says invalid clicks. And that’ll actually tell you how many invalid clicks.

Google has picked up on with your campaign and actually if you check your billing within the Google Ads platform, you’ll actually start to see the credits that Google gives back to you, because of these invalid clicks they’ve picked up on.

Now Google’s system of protection is very basic. They could consider someone they won’t actually tell you what their exact method of capturing this group of people is. What they’ll do, is they’ll just tell you how many clicks they believe have been fraudulent. And our experience it’s very basic.

They could actually just consider someone clicking on your ad three times within the space of ten minutes to actually be genuine. So, you actually need click fraud software to pick up on the other group of people that Google does not protect against. The reason being, Google is fraudulent software that picks up on these invalid clicks, is just too basic.

So Primal running our own ads campaign, we know for sure our competitors they’re just clicking on our ads, because we can see the invalid click activity extremely high. So, actually click fraud software does cost you a certain fee per month, but by installing it you’re actually able to pick up on the IP addresses that click own rules.

So for Primal I would consider someone clicking more than three times within the space of, let’s say one minute. To be extremely fraudulent. Because if you look at normal search behaviour, people usually just click once or twice, just to have a look, and then they make their decision or bounce off the website and they continue with their search activity or research. The software that we currently use is actually called clickcease.com. You can actually go there you can check it out, see what they do. Within Google Ads you’re actually able to add IP addresses of all these fraudulent people who are clicking on your ads and wasting your precious marketing budget.

And what the software will do is automatically add these IPs into the Google Ads platform go to campaigns and you go to settings, there’ll be an option there for you to actually manually add IP addresses and the software just does it for you automatically.

So far we’ve managed to save hundreds of thousands of dollars across the last three years that we’ve been using this simply because we’re protecting against people who obviously are not genuine people searching for our business. But people who are out there wasting our marketing budget. Thank you.