According to global studies, all kinds of forms of fraud and bot-farms gobble up from 21 to 28% of ad budgets. Basically just imagine giving up a third of your budget away for bleeps and giggles. And that’s exactly why today we’ve compiled a list of the best ways to avoid click fraud and preserve your hard-earned money to get even more profit.
The first thing you need to do if you notice click fraud and a “missing budget” is to completely halt your campaign and thoroughly study the statistics. Next, use all the methods. They work well when used simultaneously: block suspicious IP addresses — better to lose a couple of users than to end up wasting all your funds due to the shenanigans of competitors and ill-wishers.
Also blacklist suspicious websites – out of sight, out of mind. While you’re at it, get rid of fraudsters out to make money: promptly change your keywords and the text in your ads. To prevent the situation from repeating, try to work with as narrow a target audience as possible. This will confuse cheaters and increase the conversion rate. Use retargeting and at the same time block repeated ad displays. Google Ads has a flexible system for working with audiences. Bottom line: you allow repeated impressions within 1-2 days, no more. Next, create a retargeted 30 day ad campaign. The system remembers the IP address and cookies of the user’s computer. And for a whole month, they no longer see your ads in the search results, but are constantly exposed to reminders of you in the media network. If you organize the process properly, you’ll successfully cut out most of the fraudsters and thanks to the retargeting will work out a potential client.
As for additional tips, be sure to heed to the following:
1. Always work with a tracker. Keep an eye on the click-through and conversion rate of platforms, serious mismatches or slants for some OSs or browsers and promptly blacklist sources.
2. As for shaving, it’s incredibly difficult to detect it — if your conversion rate is high but the pay rates are lower than the average on the market, you can 99% be sure that you’re being swindled. Also, if the rates are high but the conversion rate is a bit lower, take a good hard look — shaving is highly likely.
To properly protect yourself from click fraud, be sure to analyze your ads’ statistics, promptly block suspicious users and platforms. And don’t forget about retargeting — click fraud will go down without making you stop working with potential clients.
