February 4th, 2012

Top 6 Ways To Identify Click Fraud

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.

  1. Install a web analytics package to monitor the traffic through your PPC campaigns
  2. Track your PPC campaigns accurately in order to identify which ones are being abused
  3. Look for spikes of traffic coming from each of your campaigns
  4. Analyse the geographic location of our PPC traffic ensuring it is coming from the countries specified by your PPC campaign
  5. 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
  6. 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.

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