Don't be a Click Fraud Victim - How To Fight Click Fraud

Pay Per Click advertising guarantees better ranking to your site. In a matter of short time, your site can actually be on the top of the search engines. It is as easy as placing in an amount to buy your chosen keywords and on the next instant, you get more traffic and higher site visibility. Such an easy process and truly rewarding – if done rightly.

Click Fraud Defined

Have you experienced having to pay a fortune in PPC without generating any sales? You have most likely been one of the many victims of click fraud. What is a Click Fraud? Click Fraud refers to the invalid clicks that a particular website gets. An invalid click refers to clicks done by individuals who really don’t have the intention of purchasing the site’s product or using its services. They mainly want the site owners to pay more – as there is a corresponding cost for every click in PPC. This is part of the competition in the internet business which is not beneficial at all. Usually, click fraud is done to sites that are on the top list of the search engines where bidding war occurs.

How Click Fraud Works

An individual or competitor clicks on a paid listing to harm the site owner. Basically the rationale behind click fraud is competition. When A clicks on B, B will have to pay for that click. There are times when A just keeps on clicking B (using different search engines and listings) so that B will have a large amount to pay for. It is some sort of monetary predation on the internet. This deceitful activity can actually cost a site great cost for the many clicks.

Technical Measures Against Click Frauds

Click Frauds have been breaking up the internet business of many sites. Search engines are aware of this, thus, they have come up with relevant technical measures to fight click frauds. However, the method does not guarantee complete identification of click frauds.

Overture, for instance has a click protection system that determines the validity of its advertisers clicks. Through the system, Overture can tell whether a click is valid or just one of the many click frauds. It makes use of data points on the process. There are about 20 to 50 data points used. These data points include the user’s IP address, session information, cookie information, network of the IP, browser information, time of the click and the time of the search among many others.

These data points can validate the nature of the click. Once identified as invalid, the click is not charged to the advertiser. But the click will still be seen on the advertisers’ web logs. The Click Protection System is unable to delete the invalid clicks on the web logs. This does not apply to all cases however, since not all click frauds will be determined.

Prevent Click Fraud

There is actually no way to prevent click fraud since it is not easy to identify the validity of the clicks. It is better to do your own investigation if you suspect click frauds in your listing. How are you going to do this? You should analyze your server logs. Look for repetition of IP addresses, IP addresses from cloaking software companies, and irregular number of clicks from a single geographical region. You should also consider the click –through that have dramatically increased without rank or bid changes and there might be keywords that suddenly became highly trafficked.

To be able to prevent click frauds, you should take considerable actions; otherwise, you are off to losing your internet business – having to pay a large amount without any valid clicks.

Click Frauds attack paid listings. Guard your site and don’t be a victim. Learn more about your paid listing, please see our PPC Services or contact our PPC Specialists.