Click Fraud Blog
5 Habits To Avoid Click Fraud
June 17th, 2008
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I would like to show you five good pay per click campaign habits you should adopt to avoid click fraud.
1. Keep an eye on the competition
Do you know who else is competing on your keywords? These are the potential sources of competitor click fraud. Monitor your top ten most expensive keywords and see who is also running ads againt them.
Consider looking up the domain IP range of these companies and adding them to your exclusion lists. If a competitor cannot see your ads, they cannot click on them. NB this only works if they click from their own domain.
2. Monitor the Quality of Content Network Clicks
A large amount of publisher click fraud is generated from the content networks, if you advertise on these networks, monitor the quality of your clicks very closely, choose your partner sites carefully and don’t just accept any site . If you are unhappy with a particular site, add it to your exclusion list.
3. Keep Exclusions Lists and Update them Frequently
Protect your ads by not displaying them to people you suspect may be committing click fraud. To do this create and keep up to date exclusion lists.
There are two types of exclusion lists:
a) Domain Exclusion Lists - These lists stop your ads being displayed on content network sites.
b) IP exclusion List - The list to stop activity from suspicious IP addresses for example if one IP is constantly clicking on your ads.
4. Baseline your campaigns
Do you know what your average click through rate and conversion rate is? If you base line these regularly and have this information to hand, it makes spotting trends caused by click fraud much easier.
5. Submit Refund requests at least once a month
Become a thorn in the side of your ad suppliers, do not accept that their filters are fool-proof. If you suspect click fraud, collect the evidence and submit it at regular intervals (I recommend once a month) and do not take their first stock reply as law. Ask to speak to the manager, present your evidence, get your refund.
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Tags: Click Fraud, Competitor Click Fraud, publisher click fraud
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August 28th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Great article, however it is down to google what they consider to be “Fraudulent Clicks” and surely they could easily turn around and say “your competitors clicks are genuine because they could be looking to set up a partnership with you”, e.g. web designers and web developers, seo guys etc. We find running PPC campaigns a nightmare unless they are in a niche market.
April 13th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
This sounds like good advice,I wish the game was more evenly met , and other search engines would set up, Google has the market and they know it I think their should be a world wild boycott and we should start using bing or yahoo , It hurts local business if they get with click fraud, who factored that is ? its just not fair, google should be shot or made to answer, they are wolf in sheep’s clothing , robbing the little people, like to see them go broke, its crap , charge heeps for clicks that don’t happen , or 2 clicks in the past 5 sec ? or clicks from you blocked ip list , and why only 20 ip’s ?? google should be held accountable for their crimes against humanity “small business owners” we have to eat too you know.. anyway try my link , it enplanes the invalid click reverloution and after that you may just know what its all about .. http://www.drlock.com.au/index.php/component/content/article/305.html
July 9th, 2010 at 10:02 am
This is very informative. I do hope that consumer awareness will become more widespread because unlike documents that we shred to avoid identity theft, click fraud is bit more tricky and so we have to careful.
February 10th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Great tips to avoid click fraud!