How to Eliminate Click Fraud

Inside this article:
Detection Methods  |  Human Intervention  |  Stop the Bleeding

Stop the Bleeding

What's More Important than a Refund? Adjusting Your Ads!

Getting a refund is nice, but the real savings occur when each ad is tuned to bring in real visitors who are interested in your web site. Many users of ClickTracks free up 20-40% of monthly PPC spend by adjusting ads to bring only the highest quality visitors.

For each ad listed in the Click Fraud report, login into your PPC account and adjust the following attributes to increase the chances of attracting real visitors who are interested in your site.

Syndication: Is the ad listed on syndicated sites? Most click fraud comes from ads that are allowed to be listed on syndicated sites. If you use syndication at all, remember that high bid prices attract click fraud.

Geographic Targets: Each ad should be bringing in visitors from the countries you targeted in the campaign setup (this applies to Google AdWords). The Click Fraud report will still help you learn if each country is bringing in quality visitors. If you are receiving clicks from countries that you excluded from the ad campaign, then you are likely experiencing click fraud.

Messaging: Be sure the messaging in the ad matches the messaging in the landing page. The best conversions occur when the visitor's expectation is realized after clicking on your ad.

Blocking Bad Sites

If you can identify syndicated sites that are sending bad traffic, you can block these sites in Google AdWords (and possibly other PPC systems). To do this you'll use the Content-Targeted section of the ClickTracks Search Report to identify syndicated sites that bring traffic to your web site.

First, create a label that identifies visitors that entered through a particular campaign. Creating a label in ClickTracks will allow you to compare the behavior (and source) of one type of visitor group to another. In this case, we'll create a label for visitors that came through a particular (suspect) PPC ad. You'll then be able to compare statistics for this one group to all others.

Once the label is created, open up the Search Report, and scroll down to find a list of Content-Targeted sites that brought traffic to your site. The report will list syndicated sites that brought any visitor, and then will segment the results to list sites that brought visitors through the particular ad for which you created a label. Each list will show the number of visitors brought from each site. Quantity is not quality, so the next step is to measure the quality of the visitors brought through each syndicated site.

Change the Search Report to measure visitor quality based on Short Visits (A short visit is defined by a single-page visit or a session that lasts less than 5 seconds). This view will show all keywords and syndicated sites and their related percentage of short visits.

In this example, several syndicated sites are generating 100% short visit sessions. Visit the site, by simply clicking on the URL in the report. Often, it's obvious that the syndicated site is simply a link farm that serves up ads with no content. As a guideline, when any syndicated site is generating over 90% of short visits, there is either a mismatch between the visitors' expectations and the site, or there is cause for suspicion of fraud. In either case, some adjustment is necessary.

Once you are sure the long-term traffic from this syndicated site does not include real visitors that are interested in your web site, it's time to block the site from your PPC campaigns.

Google AdWords makes this relatively easy. Login into your AdWords account, and find the offending ad. Within the campaign settings for the ad, enter in all syndicated sites that are consistently generating 100% of short visits.

Long Term Habits

The best Click Fraud report is a blank click fraud report. So once you've adjusted your campaigns to only bring in real visitors that are interested in your web site, be sure to check on a regular basis for any new click fraud.

With a systematic approach, and finely tuned ads, many users of ClickTracks' Click Fraud report find that ad spending drops dramatically while visitor quality and conversion increase. Once your PPC campaigns are performing, it makes sense to continue to invest in additional quality visitors to your site—which is probably why you started using PPC in the first place.

Are these the only ways you can use ClickTracks to confirm the effectiveness of your PPC advertising efforts? No way—this is just a quick list. Want more? Be sure to check out The ClickTracks Way for more comprehensive documentation of ClickTracks' features and attend ClickTracks' Virtual Classroom series featuring free classes on online marketing best practices. Or, hire a ClickTracks professional service rep for a few hours to get you set up and optimizing in a flash.

Inside this article:
Detection Methods  |  Human Intervention  |  Stop the Bleeding