There is one major downfall to running pay per click adverts on search engines such as Google and that is click fraud. Click fraud is a major problem for any online marketer who wishes to advertise their website through sponsored advertisements. Is click fraud already exhausting your marketing budget? Follow this article to learn more about click fraud and the newest technology available to combat it.What is click fraud?

Click fraud is where someone deliberately clicks on a PPC search engine advert for a number of reasons, but none of those reasons are to actually purchase the products or services that the advertised website may have to offer. If your adverts are a victim of click fraud, then you could be being cheated out of a considerable amount of your marketing budget. Why is this? Well, every invalid click that your advert receives is being logged and charged for in your campaign stats, this will therefore be pushing the cost of your marketing campaigns up. Some web analytics companies estimates that up to 50% of all click activity is fraudulent. This means that only half of your PPC marketing budget is actually being put to real use and generating genuine traffic to your website.

So who is the clicker?

There may not only be one person who is clicking on your PPC advert fraudulently. People who have joined Google Adsense or other PPC affiliate programs run PPC adverts on their own websites. For every time that these adverts are clicked earns the affiliate an income. This could be one of the reasons why your advert is being clicked on fraudulently, the affiliate may click the advert just to earn themselves an income, they may also ask friends and family to click your advert too.

A competitor may click on your advert in order to drive up the cost of your advertising and therefore make it too expensive for you to remain on the sponsored search results. If a competitor can make it too expensive for you to run your advertising campaigns, then they are stamping out their competition and making more room for themselves. This is an unethical but also known method of click fraud.

There are ways to monitor the clicks that your website receives, you can pay for a click fraud detection service or you may even find some free services which will also do this for you. VeriClix offers a completely free click fraud detection software service and their software is compatible across the following networks-

Google Adwords

Yahoo! Internet Marketing (Overture)

Kanoodle

And many more

Their software will help any PPC advertiser monitor their advertisements in a much closer way than before and enable you to detect click fraud by providing you with the following information about your PPC ads-

IP address (including dynamic IP addresses)

IP block owner

Geographic location

User agent

Query used

PPC ad that was clicked on

Keywords

Date & Time

Having this information available to you will enable you to track any suspicious activity occurring on your website so that you are now able to manage and eliminate click fraud as much as possible throughout your PPC campaigns. Other similar services include Click Fraud Detective, Who’s Clicking Who and Click Forensics.

So if you are in the process of running a PPC advertising campaign, make sure that your whole marketing budget is working as hard as possible for you and driving quality and valid traffic to your website. This will generate a much greater return on investment and enable your business to grow through PPC advertising.

About The Author:

Michelle Kirkbride

Michelle Kirkbride is a web developer, she currently lives in Yorkshire, UK with her two beautiful children and loving partner. She spends far too much time at her computer and is currently addicted to her work. Michelle Kirkbride the founder of Kaplang is also a business Mentor with D100, a Success Doncaster mentoring programme run by Deloitte and funded by the Doncaster Council.