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We assess and verify every single click, whether we block it or not.
Click fraud is theft. There are solutions available to fight this theft. The need for click fraud protection is more important than ever before, yet most businesses that advertise online don’t realize they are losing money through theft. Every day worthless and undesirable clicks from fraudulent and low-value sources that never convert will prevent any business from reaching its full revenue potential. Here’s what every business should know about click fraud:
- The reality of click fraud
- What is click fraud?
- The most common threat sources
- Why should you monitor and audit ad clicks?
- Are ads networks and publishers doing enough?
- The real solutions to click fraud
How much money are you spending on worthless clicks?
Most businesses that invest in online advertising operate under the assumption that most, if not all, traffic comes from “legitimate” sources. Many marketers automatically adopt the belief that all digital interactions such as clicks and views from Google and Facebook paid traffic come from humans that have some type of marketing value.
According to cyber security solution provider Imperva, more than half of all internet traffic is generated by software scripts called robots also known as bots. Imperva’s 2023 study reported the volume of bad bot traffic—high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks—grew to 30.2%, an increase of 2.5% over the previous year.
Bots are designed to visit websites for a variety of reasons. Regardless of what those reasons may be, they generate a huge amount of traffic that negatively impact pay-per-click (PPC) campaign budgets in ways that unproductively drain an advertising budget. Besides bots, marketers should recognize that there are different sources of illegitimate and undesirable ad traffic, which may result in worthless interactions. These non-revenue generating clicks hold no value to advertisers, but they are still intertwined with relevant ad traffic and therefore influence the overall performance of a company’s digital marketing campaign.
The reality of click fraud
Most businesses that invest in online advertising operate under the assumption that most, if not all, traffic comes from “legitimate” sources. Many marketers automatically adopt the belief that all digital interactions such as clicks and views from Google and Facebook paid traffic come from humans that have some type of marketing value.
According to cyber security solution provider Imperva, more than half of all internet traffic is generated by software scripts called robots also known as bots. Imperva’s 2023 study reported the volume of bad bot traffic—high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks—grew to 30.2%, an increase of 2.5% over the previous year.
Bots are designed to visit websites for a variety of reasons. Regardless of what those reasons may be, they generate a huge amount of traffic that negatively impact pay-per-click (PPC) campaign budgets in ways that unproductively drain an advertising budget. Besides bots, marketers should recognize that there are different sources of illegitimate and undesirable ad traffic, which may result in worthless interactions. These non-revenue generating clicks hold no value to advertisers, but they are still intertwined with relevant ad traffic and therefore influence the overall performance of a company’s digital marketing campaign.
How Much Money Are We Spending on Worthless Clicks?
Curious as to how much money you are spending on worthless clicks? Let us protect your Google ad account.
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What is click fraud?
Fraudulent clicks are a wasteful and deceitful drain on an ad budget that may ultimately make up a sizable portion of a business’s PPC spending. Click fraud is often used as an umbrella term to describe all the sources of non-revenue generating traffic like robots, competitors, and criminal organizations. Yet at the end of the day, think about click fraud as simply a devious interaction between a user and a PPC ad that is done to generate illegitimate charges for marketers. These fraudulent users may be robots, humans, or a combination of the two.
Keep in mind that behind all click fraud lies a culprit with a motive, be it a competitor or organization that somehow benefits from draining a company’s PPC budget. Click fraud protection is vital to an online advertiser’s bottom line.
The most common click fraud threats
- Competitors pose a high threat level because they are threatened by your Google organic rankings and high visibility PPC ads. Some competitors may hire offshore click farms, nefarious app developers who execute bot attacks on your ads, or task their own employees to wreak havoc. Motives for competitors usually begin with attacks designed to drain your daily PPC budget so that their own PPC ads will rise to the top while your ads fall off the page. In addition, sabotage, and rivalry can play a part in their activities. These are common activities which can impose significant amounts of damage depending on the sophistication of the tactics.
- Bots and crawlers are typically a medium level threat. Billions of these clicks are generated daily across the globe. The motives behind bot and crawler traffic often involve data collection, spam, and scripting. Malicious scripting is the practice of inserting code on a website that redirects a visitor to pages that look normal but were set up by a cybercriminal to steal information.
- Proxies also pose a high level threat to your website. A proxy acts as an intermediary, passing requests from a computer to another server. Accessing the internet through a proxy makes it more difficult to locate a user through an IP address. Fraudsters use proxies to hide their IP location when performing nefarious activity.
- Click farms typically are a medium threat. A very sophisticated industry based upon fake social media likes, followers and PPC clicks, the click farm motive is profit. Vast armies of people in warehouse settings, most often overseas, are hired to click, whether to generate commissions for their clients or to drain the PPC budgets of competitors.
- Shady publishers are usually a medium threat. They have been known to implement deceitful practices to accomplish their goal of fraudulently bolstering the performance of their platforms. Many rely on bogus traffic that mimics human behavior. The motive of shady publishers is purely profit.
Why should you monitor ad clicks?
For every $3 spent on PPC ads, $1 is lost to click fraud perpetrators according to Lunio and Ad Age.
33% of your budget could be lost. This is not a reality that most businesses can afford to accept as just part of the cost of doing business.
Over $2 million in wasted clicks. That’s what Inner Architect Media has saved our clients.
We have seen an average of 20% of fraudulent click rates of our clients’ ad budget over the last 3 years.
Click fraud can completely drain a company’s budget or fully derail their digital marketing strategies. Investing in fraud protection can greatly increase ROI. With a significant ad budget, the price of a protection plan will be nothing compared to the amount of ad spend saved.
Proactively monitoring and protecting your campaigns’ paid clicks can significantly improve both the short and long-term profitability of your overall marketing efforts. Thorough efforts to eliminate illegitimate clicks can take back a large part of your marketing budget. Your savings can then be reinvested into improving your operations across the board.
Are Ad Networks and Publishers Doing Enough?
It doesn’t look that way. So why isn’t more being done about click fraud? The truth is that ad platforms are not motivated to invest the necessary resources to find a solution that gives marketers protection for their advertising budget. After all, the more clicks you get on your ads, the more money ad platforms make. Illegitimate clicks continue to plague these platforms while generating massive profits for them.
Advertisers pay for most of these fraudulent clicks and will continue to do so unless they take matters into their own hands and start demanding better controls, validation, and auditing features. Existing detection methods by the ad platforms are simply not enough. They don’t protect vulnerable small and medium-sized businesses with limited resources. These companies stand to lose the most from these illegitimate interactions.
Why Aren’t More Safeguards in Place?
The Real Solutions to Click Fraud – Inner Architect Media Click Fraud Protection
What Can PPC Fraud Protection Services by Inner Architect Media Do?
We provide individual click data – device type, IP address, geolocation, keyword details, time on site, and more intelligence to support your PPC campaigns.
You can access and filter this data to easily identify and investigate the sources of your invalid traffic.
Inner Architect has been providing click fraud protection services to our clients since 2018. We’ve seen how much money can be lost due to click fraud and the numbers are huge. We have saved our clients over $2 million in wasted clicks.
Inner Architect offers a proven click fraud prevention service managed by professionals who understand the nuances and complexity of click protection rules.
Wonder what these statistics would look like for your ad campaigns?
Curious as to how much money you are spending on worthless clicks?
Contact Inner Architect for a free consultation. Let us protect your Google ad account.
Our service is provided on a month-to-month basis. No long-term commitments required. We guarantee that your month-to-month click fraud savings will greatly surpass the cost of our service.
What do you have to lose? Call Inner Architect at 415-485-6961 or submit a website form to get started saving your ad budget today.