What's The Difference Between Click Fraud and Invalid Clicks?

With a relationship built on trust between Google and advertisers it’s no wonder that click fraud has become a real-world issue that many advertisers are constantly reminded of when looking at the performance of their Google AdWords campaigns. Advertisers rely on Google to deliver their ads on their network and thus offering a platform whereby the advertiser can be in full control of the relevancy of their ads defined by the keywords used, the bid they make and various other settings.

The main issue arises when an advertiser has set a daily budget which is met very quickly which is out of character for the campaign affected. This can often raise an immediate sense of panic as it means the upper limit of spend for the day has been met with little or no sales, enquiries or leads. You’ve probably heard of the term Click Fraud and Invalid Clicks and wondered if there was a difference. After all, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re one of the same thing, but they do have slightly different characteristics.

Click Fraud is when someone, a bot or a competitor maliciously clicks on your ads in an attempt to inflate your advertising spend. This is fraudulent behaviour and can be as simple as clicking on your ads themselves a few times from their desktop and mobile device, or it can be a more complex problem whereby people, usually in faraway countries have been paid to carry out the task of clicking on your ads, these are called click-farms. Furthermore there are malware systems designed to click on ads specifically with the task of clicking on Google ads. Click fraud is the term related specifically to maliciousness.

Invalid Clicks are clicks that are detected in Google AdWords as being irregular, inflated or impressions that are suspected by Google as not being genuine. The algorithm of this detection system is not advertised nor fully understood amongst search advertising professionals although claims to be able to identify this type of activity accurately.

However, in the real-world most advertisers are suspicious of the inbuilt invalid clicks system and look towards companies who offer services that monitor and scrutinise visitors that click through on their ads. Click Guardian, the UK’s number 1 anti-click fraud company offer a system that allows a level of user-control that is not available in Google AdWords. With a personalised dashboard, clients can choose at what frequency they’ll allow a visitor to click on their ads before they deem whether this should issue a block. Blocks are made in real-time, exactly at the time of the click fraud being committed.

If you’d like to trial Click Guardian Pro for 7 days to see whether you suffer from click fraud then visit www.clickguardian.co.uk now!