PPC Click Fraud: How to Detect and Prevent It

Experiencing unexpected click-through-rates (CTR) typically means you’ve become a victim of artificially inflated clicks.

While pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great marketing tool that is known to drive relevant traffic towards your online brand, click-fraud is a real issue that can hinder your remarketing efforts. Anyone who has the misfortune of encountering click fraud will experience marketing budget drainage.

These clicks create troublesome and cost you when look into the broader perspective. Let’s suppose in your campaign where the average CPC is between $30- $50. Now consider on average, and you are having 10 fraudulent clicks per week on the lower range of the CPC, and you will be spending around less or more than $10,000.00 per year on these invalid clicks without any return! According to World Federation of Advertisers is that click fraud will be a $50 Billion dollar a year problem by 2025, which will directly affect advertisers and business.

Click fraud impacts your quality score,  do you know how? If you have numerous invalid clicks on your ads that visit your landing page for a few seconds at a time, the search engine may deem your page as not having relevant content in relation to your keyword bids and will ultimately lower your Quality Score. With a lower Quality Score, you are forced to pay higher CPC bids to get shown in the auctions that will result in acquiring customers. Lower Quality Scores can easily double your costs in the race where the niche is an extremely competitive. So, in addition to losing money on fraudulent clicks, you are further penalized with lower quality scores and higher costs as a result of the actions of those fraudulent click activities in relation to your campaigns.

In this article, we’ll outline the points to help prevent money wastage from invalid clicks so you can make the most out of your PPC campaign.

What is Invalid Click Fraud?

Click fraud is the act of illegally clicking on PPC ads to exhaust the advertiser’s budgets. This may be a result of other individuals, an automated script or a computer program pretending to be a legitimate, interested user, clicking on paid search ads with zero intention on buying what it’s offering.

What is a Click Bot?

This is a system that has been programmed to produce click fraud. Simple click bots will access a web page and select the link, while highly-designed click bots will be programmed to take certain actions a legitimate user would make such as:

• Mouse movements
• Random pauses before taking any action
• Mixing up the timing between each click

 

What is Botnet?

Since hundreds of clicks from a single device looks suspicious, a campaign on which frauds are occurring ( click fraud campaign)  will use bots that are installed on multiple devices. These devices all have different IP addresses to appear like real user actions. This device network with copies of bots is known as a botnet.

Does Click Fraud Always Derive from Bots?

Click fraud is usually carried out by bots. However, it can also be operated by low-paid workers as well. As a group, these workers are known as a “click farm” and run from developing countries with cheap wages.

However, click farms are a lot less efficient for fraudsters and a lot more resource-intensive. It’s a lot easier to write code and create click bots than hiring dozens of workers, which is why most click fraud comes from bots.

What’s The Difference Between Click Fraud and Invalid Clicks?

Invalid click is a measure which tells how many unusual clicks happened. Not all invalid clicks are fraudulent. Some clicks don’t offer value, such as double-clicks from users and clicks that aren’t considered genuine. These clicks are detected by the ad network and can be removed from your overall costs.

Who Manages Click Fraud?

Competitors

Most Google ad click fraud situations are carried out by competitors who click on an advertisement, wasting their ad budget and turning off the advert for the day.

If a business can’t afford to outbid position one, repeatedly clicking the top advert will waste their competitor’s budget, bringing them into the top spot in ad ranking.

Webmasters

If no competitors are trying to take advantage of your PPC campaigns, certain webmasters likely will be, sooner or later.

Webmasters display Google ads on their site. To make more money, webmasters require more clicks, and instead of taking the time to develop and grow their website, they’re tempted to click their own ads. These fraudulent clicks generate the same profit as genuine clicks.

Disgruntled Advertisers

Click fraud may come down to repeat advertisers who click the same ad for many reasons. Sometimes user click on ads and then, after a few days, clicks on it again. Ideally, user should be allowed to click on an ad once before converting, however sometimes it takes more than one click to convert. This naturally increases your average conversion cost.

Fraud Rings

These are large groups of people who target ad networks to get a significant amount of money in a short amount of time. These groups may generate millions of invalid ad clicks through automated programs.

What Are The Impacts of Click Fraud on PPC Advertisement?

Here are some impacts of click fraud:

• Conversion rate is decreased, you may getting clicks but no conversions
• Campaign budget wastes away
• Impacting business revenue by draining useless reach of advertisers who don’t wish to purchase
• Skews the advertiser’s data – if your PPC campaign gains a lot of conversions and clicks, then keep it running. However, once that ad gets clicks with no conversions, consider taking the ad down. Clicks don’t mean conversions. This skewed data makes it difficult for advertisers to decide which ads should be kept and which should be stopped.

 

How is Google Acting on Click Fraud?

Google Ads monitors its platform’s activity closely to protect advertisers. It does this through advanced analysis tools, automated systems, and human reviews – all measures to catch any suspicious behavior.

The platform’s technology analyzes impressions and clicks for unusual patterns or signs of manipulation. Google Ads can tell the difference between genuine traffic and potentially dangerous traffic from risky sources. It can also find and filter most invalid traffic, which avoids unwanted charges for advertisers.

The Google click fraud algorithm collects user data. If fraud is detected, the algorithm will take action immediately by blocking the IP address involved in the click fraud, meaning the ads aren’t visible to the user.

Preventing Click Fraud Through IP Addresses

Whenever you have a site visitor, they leave an IP address trail that is track able by webmasters. IP addresses that are consistently coming to your site but aren’t taking action are likely cases of click fraud.

IP Exclusions in Google Ads for Click Fraud Prevention

If you’ve checked on the IP addresses responsible for click fraud, you can block your Google Ad from serving that address in the future.

Here’s how:

• Click on the campaign you wish to exclude IP addresses from
• Click on “Advanced Settings”
• Choose the IP Exclusions link
• Select “Edit”
• Type in the click fraud addresses
• Choose “Save”

 

What if a Dynamic IP is Used for Fraudulent Clicks?

Attackers can leech onto your ads through IP hopping tools and proxies, resulting in wasted clicks and impressions – similar to a game of cat and mouse.

Third-party tools are available to help identify these IP behaviors. Using IP or IP-based features come with fewer downfalls when it comes to detecting true fraudulent activity. If you wish to detect these behaviors on your own, however, keep the IP and source cookie tracking streaming through your landing page, creating a unique visitor ID number.

As soon as you have enough data and have observed unexpected clicks on your ads, you can then create an alert for the unique ID visitor. These IPs can also be tracked to understand their behavior and patterns based on AI algorithms.

Make sure you create a report for it and share this report with Google. If not, you’ll continue to get the wrong CTR and drain your budget.

Minimizing & Preventing Fraudulent Clicks

How to Prevent Fraudulent Clicks Through Timestamps

Observing both click and action timestamp helps you prevent click fraud. From the time a visitor enters your site through an ad until the time the advertiser completes an action on your site, if you notice an IP address that contains multiple clicks but no action, it’s likely a click fraud. This IP address should be blocked.

How Do User-Agents Prevent Click Fraud?

A user agent identifies if the same person is using an IP address. It takes note about all the features of the device being used to access your site such as type of computer or device, internet browser, software, and more.

If you notice an IP address is pretending to be human and draining your campaign, exclude the IP address.

How Google Display Network Remarketing Campaigns Helps in Minimizing Click Fraud?

If you’re concerned about publisher-based click fraud, It is easily avoided with remarketing, because ads are only displayed to those who have visited and displayed interest in the advertiser’s website. There’s no risk of publishers clicking on the ads, because they can’t see them.

How Targeted PPC Keywords Prevent Click Fraud?

The best way of handling click fraud is to minimize the level of damage that false clicks effected on your campaign. For the highest possible ROI, only bid on targeted, industry-specific keywords since these will produce more traffic while ensuring the majority of clicks are from relevant advertisers – not bots.

How Does User Behavior Prevent Click Fraud?

Minimizing click fraud begins with identifying it. If you’d like to remove false clicks and increase your ad value, check your PPC campaigns every day – something you should be doing if you’d like to know which keywords and ads are producing the best results.

Make sure you check your user search behavior or the reason why the search occurs, including the informational, navigational, and transactional user behaviors. If a group with the same behavior includes fraudulent clicks, stop your ads.

How Establishing Proper Budget Prevents Click Fraud

To reduce the chance of Click Fraud for your PPC campaigns, you should consider setting up a maximum daily PPC budget so that you are never charged more than a certain amount each day. This should help you to reduce and  analyze the budget waste due to fraudulent clicks.

How Ad Targeting Prevents Click Fraud

Sometimes, all you need is a simple tweak to your targeting to eliminate invalid clicks. If you assume click fraud is coming from a specific geographical area, where you are not offering services and bulk of clicks coming from there then exclude these locations.

To do this:

1. Sign in to your Google ads account
2. Click on “Location” and exclude the suspected location if the majority of the clicks are believed to be fraudulent.

Click Fraud in Mobile Ads

Spam and fraud are increasing in mobile devices. This attempts to defraud publishers, advertisers, or supply partners by exploiting mobile ad technology to drain their ad budgets.

Types of mobile ad fraud:

Click Spam: This happens when a fraudster clicks ads for users who are unaware they’ve even been exposed to the ad and might be keep on clicking in the background.

Click Injection: This sophisticated click spamming is done by publishing an app that listens to “install broadcasts,” making it possible to detect when apps are downloaded on the device. This causes fraudsters to trigger clicks before the installation is finished.

SDK Spoofing: SDK spoofing is also known as traffic spoofing or replay attacks. It is the creation of illegitimate installs using data of real devices it means fraudsters utilize a real device to create installs that look real to consume an advertiser’s budget

How to Detect Mobile Click Fraud

CTIT (Click to Install Time): This is the time required to click through towards the download and a metric to determine the install fraud. If the time between the click and download is less than 5 seconds, yet has a high density of downloads, click injection fraud is usually happening.

Click-Install Frequency: This is similar to CTIT however is a different analysis in case fraudsters are avoiding CTIT detection.

Install to Event Time: if you notice most purchases happen in a short time interval, for instance, if the user has downloaded your app, and bought a product in seconds, you’re likely a victim of SDK spoofing fraud.

Event Flow: The event flow analytics helps you understand the quality of the source you’re receiving traffic from, making it helpful to define events when publishing your app. Question any publisher that provides downloads despite the sequence of events.

AI and Click Fraud Prevention

There are many click fraud detection software available that use AI to provide industry-leading detection through heuristics and pattern recognition.

Automated detection systems are created through complex algorithms and AI to detect and remove invalid clicks before advertisers are charged. AI saves you time and money by analyzing what click fraud looks like and helps you block fraudulent clicks automatically.

Using AI and ML, cursor movement behavior can be tracked. Then the model is trained to tell if the click is valid or not. In image one below, you’ll see a real user’s movements – natural. In image 2, you’ll see the bot cursor movement – smooth and uses random clicks until the required buttons and links are found.

With AI, these patterns are recorded, analyzed, and marked as invalid.

 

Claiming Google Refund Policy on Click Fraud

Google provides a form for customers to report any potential click fraud. However, they make it clear that it’s the advertiser’s responsibility to analyze your click-through reports and take the required actions.

Wrap Up

Click fraud comes in many forms and disguises, but thanks to modern technology, there are many ways to detect and prevent click fraud from happening to your campaign. All it requires is a bit of focus, observation, and in-depth analysis, to become the master of your ad campaign.

You can learn more by reading our blog on How to Succeed with PPC Data-Driven Analysis.