Click Fraud Blog
How To Stop Competitor Click Fraud
October 24th, 2007
In the first two part of the series on competitor click fraud I created a definition of competitor click fraud, then went on to discuss how to spot competitor click fraud, now I will talk about how you can stop those pesky competitors clicks.
The most valuable piece of information you will have collected during your investigation into competitor fraud is the domain details of your competition. Using a service such as whois.org it is possible to do a reverse lookup of the domain name to get the IP address range of the company. Alternatively, the domain will be masked and you will already have a suspect IP address.
Equipped with the IP address head off to your PPC supplier and exclude the IP address from being able to access your ads. This stops your competitor dead in their tracks by not displaying your ad to any computer with the IP address (or range of addresses) you supply.
Using the belt and braces approach I then go on to ensure no competitors are able to display my ads on their domains by adding their name to my excluded list with regards to content network displays from Google.
So up to this point we have excluded machines from seeing our ads, the next point is to tell-tales. Make a report to Google about your findings, stating explicitly that you believe you have been the subject of a competitor fraud, refer to my article Getting a refund from your PPC supplier for details contacting the search engines.
The above points should be more than enough to stop competitor clicks, your only recourse if they keep attacking you is to contact your local legal team for a cease and desist letter. This will only work if your competitor is in the same jurisdiction as yourself. This of course may force the company to more underhand and alarming click fraud attacks through ClickBots or click farms.
I advise most people who are the subject of click fraud to look into one of the inexpensive click fraud monitoring solutions. They help to identify invalid clicks much more easily and provide a wealth of evidence to give to the search engines for your refund. Make it a matter of course to create a monthly report for fee refunds.
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Tags: Competitor Click Fraud
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