What are Fake Clicks?
Are you a victim of fake clicks on your Google Ads ads? It’s a growing issue amongst Google Ads advertisers that is showing no signs of receding.
“Click Fraud more than doubles between 2016 and 2017” Source: Business Insider“In 2017 it’s estimated that $16.7 billion will be lost due to click fraud which is more than double of 2016 estimated at $7.2 billion.”
The sources of click fraud and fake clicks activity is increasing and should be something everyone managing an Google Ads campaign should be aware of, whether you’re an account owner or PPC manager or agency. Traditionally you’d expect the fake clicks issue to be something perpetrated via a competitor within the same market but in today’s fast changing world, there are other underhand tactics being used which can inflate your Google Ads spend unnecessarily. Let’s explore some of the ways in which fake clicks can cause damage:
A traditional form of click fraud that can cause damage is competitor clicking, a crude and often damaging form of click fraud that is predominantly competitor vs competitor. This is a low-tech form of creating fake clicks on the account that leaves the victim with inflated costs.
Click farms are tend to be a large group of low-paid workers who click on ads to either inflate the costs for advertisers or generate fake clicks in order to benefit an AdSense Publisher, whereby a publisher is paid a small percentage of an ad click. This technique usually bypasses the invalid clicks filters because they’ll spend enough time navigating the target web site and may even perform common call-to-actions such as filling in a form or subscribing to a newsletter. This form of fake clicks generation is as harmful as any other click fraud and normally taken place from areas of the world with poorer economies.
Malware is a malicious form of software that infects computers and has many different malicious intents. Often used to generate fake clicks on ads, malware is powerful and can be highly destructive in terms of generating fake clicks. The beneficiary would be the group who have coded and planted the malware. This would normally be a form of AdSense click fraud which would cost the advertiser on one hand whilst Google are also losing by having to pay the publisher for fake clicks.
As an advertiser it’s vital that any kind of click fraud is detected at an early stage purely to save wasted budget. With so many inventive ways of committing click fraud, using a 3rd party fake clicks monitoring tool is a useful addition to a PPC manager’s toolkit.
Preventing fake clicks is something that Click Guardian’s monitoring tool is exceptionally good at. Blocking this kind of activity in real-time means saved budget for Google Ads clients and continuing their advertising without having to worry about click fraud. If you’re a victim of click fraud or would just like to eradicate fake clicks from your campaigns then benefit from a free 7 day trial of Click Guardian Pro