Cyber Fraud In PPC Campaigns

In PPC advertising you have the control to choose” keywords/phrases”, and then you bid how much you’d like to pay for each click. By paying anywhere from a nickel to a $100 per keyword term, you are effectively reserving ad space on the Search engine page that comes up when someone has typed in that keyword.

So when a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your key phrases, your ad appears, and if someone click on it your account is then charged. When the click occurs, it will take the visitor to the landing page. That’s how its supposed to work. But like as very advantage is followed with a disadvantage we have something called “click fraud” Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is recognized as the biggest problem today in PPC advertising. A very recent survey, “60% of people surveyed by the “Search Engine Professional Organization” have stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising”

The main sources of click fraud are the following four:

1) AdSense
Google Adsense does pay website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google monitor this and it’s against their terms to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a advertiser doing this, they will lose their accounts.

2) Bots
They are automated robot programs used for clicking on the PPC Ads

3) Competition
There are chances that your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period in order to reduce your ad budget.

4) Professional Clickers
In some countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads. Many are not aware why they are doing it and don’t care. Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against fraud click. Google offers suggestions such as using “negative keywords” to avoid fraud clicks. Google asks that you contact them if you suspect fraud.

Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, user’s session info and what they call “pattern recognition.” They have system in place to detect fraud and a specialized team that monitors and works with the advertisers to stop it.

Google also follows the same pattern to detect click fraud Google take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Google never bills you for any fraud clicks monitored by their system.

As website owners need to be alert to any “suspicious activity” by researching their server logs or stats. If you are experiencing lot of clicks and no sales you’ll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any fluctuation in traffic, usually coming from PPC source for any single keyword or phrases. The end conclusion is, you need to be very observant of your clicks in any PPC campaign.