Click Fraud – What you can do about it.
By Rod Jacka
Click fraud is where a person or software program imitates a legitimate visitor to a website and clicks on a pay per click advertisement in a search engine marketing campaign. By clicking on this advertisement the advertiser is then charged for the click.
There are several motives for why someone would do this including:
- Profit – either they or a related business is making money from the advertisements based on the number of clicks that they receive,
- Competition – to knock out a competitor from bidding on the specified keywords by either exhausting their advertising budget or by substantially increasing their costs
- Others with hostile intentions – this could include disgruntled customers or others who have some personal feelings about a company and wish to do some damage
Some estimates place the impact of click fraud to be around 20% of the advertising budget others as high as 70%. So how do you know whether you are the victim of this practice?
ClickTracks, the award winning web analytics software company, has spent a considerable effort studying this problem. Their investigation into how to combat this problem led them to find that it is often quite difficult to determine whether a real fraud event occurred or whether the advertising campaign was poorly implemented. In either case it is in the interests of the advertiser to do something about it.
ClickTracks Professional evaluates 8 variables for each advertisement to determine whether it is either the source of potential click fraud or is just not performing. For each advertisement it analyses the following variables:
1. The overall number of sessions
2. How effective your ad converts visitors into customers
3. The total cost of the campaigns
4. Number of single page sessions from visitors
5. Number of different IP addresses.
6. Number clicks from a particular country
7. Number of sessions with no referrer
8. Number of sessions that reach a specified “target” or “goal” page on your site
The result is a report that shows you the advertisements that are “at risk” of click fraud or are just not performing well.
Armed with this knowledge you can either generate a forensic audit that you can send to the advertising provider with your request for them to investigate or you can improve or drop the advertisement. Either way it is in your interest to know what is going on.
For a free demonstration of ClickTracks Professional please contact us.
For a more detailed description of Click Fraud I refer you to the Wikipedia entry for Click Fraud.
I also encourage you to download and read the ClickTracks white paper on click fraud.
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