Pay Per Click Campaigns – How to Prevent Click Fraud?

Pay Per Click or PPC is a very cost effective advertising method which can be used to promote your goods and services on the internet. If done correctly, this technique can be very profitable and can drive large number of targeted traffic to your website. But PPC is not easy. Out of the various problems associated with PPC, the most important is ‘Click Fraud’. Click fraud is generally done by webmasters who fraudulently click on the PPC ads shown on their webpages to boost up their revenue. Sometimes it is also done by your competitors who may try to drive up your advertising cost. As the minimum price of each click is generally based on the popularity of the keyword, click fraud may drive up the cost of each click. Generally the percentage of click fraud is more in the smaller search engines. Though the search engines have their own inbuilt mechanisms to fight against fraud, the following tips will help you to safeguard against such fraud :–

(i) Incentive sites: Never join any PPC network that allows incentive sites. Such sites are not fraudulent sites but they offer some incentives to the visitors in return of the clicks. So, the traffic which you receive from such sites are not targeted and are useless.

(ii) Study your server logs: You may study your server logs daily to find out multiple clicks which have originated from the same IP. If you find any, you must report the same to your PPC company.

(iii) Frequency caps: The PPC company must use frequency caps. A frequency cap is a filter which detects duplicate clicks originating from the same IP and prevents those from deducted from your balance.

(iv) Limit your daily spends: You should make a budget and limit your daily spend for PPC. Only invest such amount which you can afford to lose.

(v) Country filters: Country filtering may help you to prevent click fraud to some extent. To prevent click fraud, you may exclude certain African, East European and Asian countries from your target market.

(vi) Tools: There are some specialized tools such as ‘Click Tracking Software’ which may be used to prevent click fraud.