Following on from a question I was asked from a client last week, and having been asked about it several times, click fraud is very much a worry for businesses advertising on pay per click platforms. The main concern is how do you know if your competitors are clicking on your ads and what can you do about it?

So what is click fraud?
Basically it involves third parties clicking on your ads multiple times to use up your budget quickly so that your ads are stopped also making your business suffer so that your paid ads deliver no return from your spend.

Fraudulent clicks can come from a variety of sources: competitors, disgruntled customers, disgruntled suppliers, even disgruntled staff all trying to increase your advertising bill as much as they can, to the point that you may need to stop your ads. ‘Bots’ can also be the cause of click fraud which is automated clicking on ads.

The major pay per click advertising providers, i.e. Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter are all well aware of the problem and there has been a lot of publicity about the subject over the last few years.

Most people have 2 burning questions on the subject:
What are the search engines doing about it?
What can I do about it?

Firstly, what are the search engines doing about it?
The providers have systems in place to track fraudulent clicks or ‘invalid clicks’. They can track multiple clicks from the same IP address, which is often how click fraud is detected. The pay per click provider is then obliged to refund those clicks back to the advertiser. Google has a whole section dedicated to click quality which you can find here.

What can you do about it?
The best way is to monitor your pay per click campaigns and look out for any sudden spikes in traffic or unexplained trends in your clicks that can’t be accounted for. For example, sudden very high click through rates, particularly on your more expensive competitive keywords which usually have lower click through rates. Perhaps you usually receive a high ROI (return on investment) from your adwords campaign, but suddenly the return has decreased. If you think that you are the victim of click fraud, the first thing you should do is collect your data and contact the pay per click provider with your findings.

If you want to read more about click fraud, here are a few links on the subject:

Botnet click fraud at record high – TheRegister.co.uk

Click Fraud Not Dead Yet – SearchEngineWatch.com

Click Fraud 101 – SearchEngineWatch.com

Needed: A Detailed Picture of Click Quality – Traffick.com