How To Stop Click Fraud In 4 Free Steps

How to Stop Click Fraud?

Invalid click activity A.K.A “click fraud“, has become the weapon of choice for unethical competitors and rouge ex-employees. Recent research estimate fraudulent click activity cost over $18.5 billion in 2015 alone. In other words, for every $3 spent, $1 will go to fraud. With statistics like that – Every digital marketer MUST ask himself – what are the steps I need to make in order to stop click fraud and keep my Paid click accounts safe?

Adjust Targeting Settings

All Major Pay Per Click platforms – Google Adwords, Bing-Yahoo Adcenter and Facebook – offer strict targeting. Weather you’re advertising on Search networks, Display networks or Facebook – you can tweak and adjust your targeting settings to make it much harder for the bad guys to see your paid ads in the first place. Apply Geographic and Language targeting to accurately reflect your prospective customers only.

Track your Visitors

P.P.C. platforms offer very little information about the online identity of users who click paid ads. Google Analytics provide statistical data only, and does not identify users in any way. In order to stop click fraud – you must first identify I.P. addresses and physical devices from which the invalid click attacks are coming from. Get a solid tracking software that does just that and install it on your website. In no time you should be able to identify I.P.s and Devices from your paid visitors. Analyze the data. Do you see a suspicious click activity? time for the next step.

Block Suspicious I.P.s and Websites

Utilizing the built-in blocking option is a great way to stop invalid clicks before they happen! Both Google AdWords and Bing-Yahoo AdCenter offer the option to prevent suspected I.P.s from ever viewing your paid ads. This option is set per campaign and is found at “Campaign Settings”-> “IP Exclusions“. Once you blacklist a harassing IP or even an IP range, Google and Bing will STOP Serving your ads altogether to that IP, thus eliminating the invalid clicks before they take place next time.

Send Click Fraud Proof – Get Your Money Back

Stopping click fraud entirely is very challenging. After applying step 2 to your website, download & analyze your paid click data. Got invalid clicks you paid for? Sending back a detailed click report containing IP & Device information will help you get your money back. Search Engines & PPC platforms realize click fraud is hurting their business. They will investigate & reimburse your account for proven click fraud that wasn’t caught up by automatic filters.

Join Clixtell

Although all 4 steps above are very easy and a MUST for every digital marketer – Clixtell can take care of the entire process for you – Automatically! Clixtell’s brilliant algorithm can identify and block invalid click activity real-time & on the fly! Try us free today – www.clixtell.com