When you are running a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign and have taken pains to create excellent ad copy and appealing landing pages, the last thing you want to encounter is a flurry of ad clicks that do not lead to conversions and sales. However, that is what happens in click fraud. Your business competitors, ad publishers, or fraud rings may employ individuals, software programs, and bots to click on your advertisements and drive up your advertising budget without getting the return on investment you deserve.

Unless you make regular attempts at detecting ad fraud, you could end up hurting your business. Let’s say that you have a daily advertising budget of $500. Google will only allow clicks on the advertisements up to that limit, and so the PPC ads will turn off after reaching the budget threshold for the day. That means, in case most of the clicks are fraudulent ones, you will have wasted your budget, and the click fraud will have prevented your target customers from clicking on your ads and reaching your website.

Five ways to detect click fraud

The growth of online click fraud has paralleled the increase in advertising revenues. By detecting ad fraud early on, you can take actionable steps to protect your investment and your business and stay competitive in your industry. Here are five ways to detect click fraud:

• Monitor user activity

After you launch a PPC advertising campaign, it is essential to monitor user activity as often as possible. There can be a spike in traffic for various reasons, including seasonal trends, reduced competition, and campaign optimization with better keywords, new targeted countries and languages, and a higher budget. However, you want to look out for repeat visitors who keep clicking on the PPC advertisements but do not take action on your website. For example, they do not buy or download your products or services.
Such unusual peaks in ad clicks may indicate click fraud since they are wasting clicks and not displaying any interest in becoming customers.

• Read web server logs

After you set the webserver configuration to activities per the combined log format, the logs can record all the webserver activities. By reading the web server logs, you can get information about the IP addresses of the people clicking on your advertisements, the date and time when they clicked on them, and the user agent details such as which device, browser, and operating system they used.

However, keep in mind that IP addresses may not always be unique since some internet service providers dynamically cycle IPs among their users and some establishments use proxy servers. Use IP addresses in tandem with other activity information to detect click fraud.

• Check Google Ads account performance

Familiarize yourself with the campaign performance and the account performance features that Google Ads offers. They can help you customize your performance data and gain essential insights into how individual ad groups have fared. You can check if there has been an extraordinary rise in impressions or the number of times your advertisements appear on search results pages and the number of clicks on the advertisements. If the increase in impressions and clicks does not show a corresponding rise in conversions and page views, it might be click fraud. You might want to notify Google of the number and percentage of fraudulent clicks at once so that you do not end up paying for them.

• Invest in click tracking software

The click tracking software can be a time-saver as it can sift through thousands of web server logs every day and gather user information. You will have an easier time reviewing the IP addresses and detecting fraudulent activity.

• Use the Google Traffic Quality program

Its automated detection system uses deep research, complex algorithms, automatic filters, and machine learning to detect fraudulent click activity in real-time. That can save you from getting charged for invalid clicks. Additionally, the program maintains a team of experts to review and analyze search result impressions, advertisement clicks, and website traffic. It takes steps to keep fraudsters out of their network. That way, they can protect advertisers and help them get the appropriate return on their investment.