Top 6 Ways To Identify Click Fraud
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on June 5th, 2007
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What is Click Fraud?
When you have a Pay-Per-Click online marketing campaign with an orgnisation such as Google Adwords, Overture or Miva you will receive visitors through these adverts and on to your website. Typically you will pay for every click that is made on your advert and the website that hosts your advert will receive a share of the revenue, along with the ad providor.
Click Fraud is when someone increases the number of clicks you get on your advert through fraudulent means such as creating a robot script or just getting lots of people to click the advert. The idea being that it can generate revenue for the website that is hosting your advert and/or cause the advertiser a fraudulent loss of income.
How to Stop Click Fraud
Below is a list of how you can identify when you are a victim of click fraud.
- Install a web analytics package to monitor the traffic through your PPC campaigns
- Track your PPC campaigns accurately in order to identify which ones are being abused
- Look for spikes of traffic coming from each of your campaigns
- Analyse the geographic location of our PPC traffic ensuring it is coming from the countries specified by your PPC campaign
- Look at the bounce rate of your PPC campaigns, if you receive lots of traffic that mostly bounces then either your landing page needs work or you’re a victim of click fraud
- Look at other measures of quality for your PPC traffic including total time on site and the page views : visits ratio
If you have an opinion on click fraud and how you identify it, please share your thoughts by adding a comment below.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Matt,
Very good outline.
I think it’s also somewhat important to note where click fraud typically comes from:
Publishers - that work directly with the search engines by publishing their ads (such as AdSense) and receive a portion of the revenue for every click generated. And Advertisers - that may want to waste their competitors budget.
In terms of what to track, you gave a very good summary. However, in case your readers are interested, there are a number of 3rd party tools that can do all of the monitoring for them, such as www.AdWatcher.com (shameless plug :)), WhosClickingWho.com and Clicklab.com
Boris
June 5th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Boris,
Good point, there are a number of ways of faudsters making monkey from pay-per-click advertising and so you should identify what the best ways of detecting click fraud is for your individual website.
Matt
June 6th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Boris,
Great post.
Are you aware that there’s a website called ClickFraudNetwork.com that provides free reporting tools to allow you to fight click fraud.
It was put together to help educate the industry and provide basic fraud prevention tools to the advertising community.
Paul