What is Click Fraud? And How Do You Protect Against It? - mabo.co.uk

In 2017 alone, about 1 in 5 clicks on Google Ads were fraudulent, with the number slowly increasing every month. To put it simply, click fraud can be defined as: The fraudulent clicking of Pay Per Click adverts to generate fraudulent charges for advertisers. Pay Per Click is the key message here. If the same fraudulent clicks took place on a different model, say a cost per impression model, then it would be completely different as advertisers are charged every per 1,000 views, regardless of how many clicks they get.

So how does click fraud work?

If we use leaflets as an example here, then it’s the same as someone tearing up all your leaflets so your potential customers do not see them. Since they’ve run off with your leaflets, how is anybody else going to hear from you? They probably won’t, unless you buy more leaflets which will cost you more money. If you do decide to buy more leaflets then what are the chances that the same person will come and take them all again?

Because of this, you need to be able to act on this to prevent you wasting valuable budget on fraudulent clicks.

How do you prevent click fraud manually?

To do this manually, this is a very time-consuming process. The steps you have to take are:

• Analyse each and every click from each IP address.
• Look at the frequency of each click
• Judge for yourself if you deem these clicks to be fraudulent
• Manually block that IP address

The main downfalls of doing this manually are:

• You are relying on your own judgement as to whether you feel these clicks are fraudulent. This is a very emotive action, so maybe not the best thing to do.
• You will more than likely generate hundreds, if not thousands of clicks on a daily basis. This means it would be very time-consuming to do this.

Is there a better solution for this?

The short answer to this is yes.

We have developed a solution for our clients which can completely automate this whole process. From analysing every single click based on over 100 permutations to deem whether a click is fraudulent, blocking the IP and then calculating how much money you will have saved had you not blocked that IP.

In reality, this is not something that should be left to a human to do. It isn’t very cost effective, and something like this should never be an emotive

The solution starts from £20 per month and can really help you generate a much better R.O.I. from your Google Ads advertising, as well as acting as an extra level of security for your account.

This tool compliments our Award-Winning PPC Management service fantastically and further emphasises the importance of working with a specialist agency like Mabo.

For more information on our Click Fraud Protection Tool, then please contact a member of our team on 01287 244080 or leave your details in the form below. A member of our team will be in touch to see how we could potentially help.