Tips and Tricks to Do Away With Click Fraud

There are many business people who are fed up of receiving invalid clicks on their Google AdWords account. They must be concerned about the valid clicks. But, they do not know what makes these clicks invalid. For this, they must take a planned action and make their AdWords results better.

Google AdWords provides wonderful method to make money out of your business. It connects people with your business who are actually searching for the services or products you deal in. This bidding platforms is not like that presently which it used to be a decade ago. It works like a war between businesses for the sake of improving their performance.

Apart from the many advantages, advertisers feel hesitant to invest due to click fraud. But, being updated with this phenomenon and having a sharp eye on the AdWords account, you can protect your business and remain on the top.

Defining Click Fraud

It is a false (black hat) method to inflate the count of clicks over your pay per click ads. This might happen due to two reasons:

• Publishers of ad, click on advertisement being available on their own website. It helps them generate better revenue for themselves.
• Advertisers try to obstruct their potential competitors by driving the costs up and meet the budget caps prior the day.

Is there a Way To Detect Click Fraud In Your Own Account?

After going through the definition of click fraud, you must be wondering that how to detect these malicious clicks in your own account. There are varied tactics to explore whether who are falling prey to fraud clicks. It depends on the resources and time in your hand to know about this fraud. You can conduct this analysis with two different methods named automated and manual analysis.

If you opt for manual method, you require internal reporting in hand, to detect as Google only informs you a click turning into lead. But, internal report will let you know whether the specific lead turned into sale. This will aid you to alter your bids to work in favor to result in the sale. To trace click fraud, you require collecting information like

• User agents
• Click & action timestamp
• IP address

Click and action timestamp are required to discover IP addresses that arrive at your website making a click on the ad but does not or merely leads to conversion. Now, if you see a lot of clickstamps without action timestamps, then it might be fraud of clicks. And, user agent is recommended to know whether a person on a specific IP is the similar person. Further, you will come to know about the browser, device, and software through which the site was being accessed. If you find a fraud IP, you must check IP on the website who belongs to that through resources like www.ip2location.com, www.whatismyipaddress.com, etc.

You should also try to find out the proxy servers. And, your suspicion will get darker, if you come to know that traffic through these IP addresses is coming from public places such as university, coffee shop, cyber cafe, etc. If you succeed to trace fraud click on your account, make sure you report it to AdWords support section.

Tips to control click fraud in your account

Switch your ad targeting

Once you get to know the source of fraudulent (e.g. particular location), then it will be the best decision to remove those locations and related languages. In case, you found your competitors websites indulged in it, then you may opt to remove their city, zip code, etc. Make sure that you take these decisive measures only when you are confident about these particular fraudulent.

Work on Twitter & Facebook Ads

It is a great deal to utilize these platforms to the fullest. The best advantage of using these channels is that your ads will appear on limited area without the intervention of third-party publishers. But, what to do if ill will competitors click on it? They rarely do so as their bigger projects are specific. As ad placement on their platforms is done on the basis of keyword research, therefore competitors cannot find these ads so easily.

Diversify Keywords

It is a good practice if you do not restrict yourself to a few keywords. Try varied verticals along with varied websites so that malicious competitors will not be able to identify you. Apart from AdWords, you should try your hand on SMM, SEO and other areas.

Banning IP

Anytime you find a particular IP fishy, you can immediately block your ad for this IP in the future. For you, you only need to reach setting bar, scroll it down and click IP Exclusions setting. Here, choose the malicious address and you will attain success.

Conclusion

By this time, you must be aware of the fact that how click fraud poses so many problems, affects multitude of businesses, etc. Thus, it is high time you start a war against this fraud. As mentioned above, you can detect it with several methods and evade it with multiple tricks. Once you get to know the right ways to deal it, you will be able to do away with this easily. Obviously, you will not be able to monitor everything in a single day, but things will start getting better once you start working on it dedicatedly. Plan positively and reap desired results.