Click Fraud Protection
Click Fraud Protection Service in San Francisco
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. Yet 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
The Reality of Click Fraud
The reality is that more than half of all internet traffic is generated by software scripts called robots, or bots. 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 robots, marketers should recognize that there are different sources of illegitimate 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 have a huge impact on the performance of a company’s digital marketing campaign.
Curious as to how much money you are spending on worthless clicks? Let us protect your Google ad account. After one month of protection, we can estimate your long-term savings potential.
What is Click Fraud?
Illegitimate clicks are a wasteful and often deceitful drain on an ad budget that may ultimately make up a huge 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 being simply a deceitful interaction between a user and a PPC ad that is done in order to generate illegitimate charges for marketers. These fraudulent users may be robots, human, 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 a company’s bottom line.
The Most Common Threat Sources
- Competitors pose a high threat level. This is very common activity which can impose huge amounts of damage depending on the sophistication of the tactics. Motives for competitors include financial gain, sabotage and rivalry.
- Bots and crawlers are typically a medium level threat. Non-human traffic represents over 50% of internet traffic. Billions of these clicks are generated daily across the globe. The motives behind bot and crawler traffic often involves 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 of 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. They are hired to click.
- Shady Publishers are usually a medium threat. They have been known to implement deceitful practices towards the goal of 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 and Audit Ad Clicks?
Illegitimate and fake clicks present an intangible threat. Although it may be difficult to visualize the detrimental effects, these interactions should not be taken lightly given the fact that click fraud can completely drain a company’s budget or fully derail their digital marketing strategies.
Keep in mind that $1 of every $3 spent on ads comes from fraudulent clicks. This is not a reality that most businesses can afford to accept as just part of the cost of doing business.
Proactively monitoring, auditing, 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. This savings can then be reinvested into improving your operations across the board.
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.
Are Ads Networks and Publishers Doing Enough?
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. Google and the other big networks claim to be committed to combating what they refer to as “invalid clicks” or “invalid interactions”. But their poor attention to the issue only serves to give advertisers a false sense of confidence. Illegitimate clicks continue to plague these platforms while generating massive profits.
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 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.
The Real Solutions to Click Fraud
Click fraud is an ever-evolving issue that plagues millions of marketers and advertisers each day. Since Google is not doing all they can to help prevent fraudulent clicks, marketers need to go out of their way to keep their ad campaigns safe. PPC fraud protection software can identify the IP address, device type, and other parameters, and check these against existing databases of known fraud. These services are also able to identify patterns and behaviors that click fraud bots exhibit and stop them in their tracks. With wide-range behavior monitoring features, these software solutions can automatically determine users that aren’t bringing value to your company, and make sure they don’t see your ads.
Here at Inner Architect, we know all about click fraud, because we’ve been monitoring click fraud for 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. We have seen fraudulent click rates that range from 20% to one extreme case of 60% of our clients’ ad budget.
Wonder what these statistics would look like for your ad campaigns? Curious as to how much money you are spending on worthless clicks? Let us protect your Google ad account. After one month of protection, we can estimate your long-term savings potential. Contact Inner Architect for a free consultation.
Our Protection Guarantee
We guarantee that your month-to-month click fraud savings will greatly surpass the cost of our service. Our service is provided on a month-to-month basis. No long-term commitments required.
What do you have to lose? Call Inner Architect at 415-485-6961 or submit a website form to get started saving from click fraud protection today.
