How To Stop Click Fraud Google Ads

Today I am going to discuss with you how to prevent click fraud Google ads.

To find out more check out my video below or keep reading for the full blog.

Search advertising is absolutely fantastic. It’s a great way of making money. But you can bet your bottom dollar where there are opportunities to make money.

The fraudsters are only steps ahead of you, in order to bring you back down again. In fact, click fraud is at its worst ever, regardless of the size of your business. Nobody can be entirely safe.

Did you know between the years 2016 and 2018 7.2 billion pounds were lost purely as a result of click fraud? So what is click fraud, click fraud are techniques that are employed in order to draw artificial clicks to your Google ads. So that you incur costs, whereas the intention to purchase is non-existent. Click forward can come from many different sources.

These could be your competitors who are artificially clicking on your links deliberately so that you incur costs on your Google ads. But the smarter people out there, they even write software, which will automatically go on to a search for your ads on Google. And they will automatically click on your ads using something called bots.

So this is basically this clever software, which simulates the behaviour of a human being, they have no intention to buy. All they want to do is to cause damage by increasing your ad costs.

So now, I’m going to discuss the five different ways in which you can prevent or minimize click fraud Google Ads.

So IP stands for Internet Protocol. Just like you have a home address, everybody who visits your website has a special address number caught an IP address.

Now what you can do, you can find out irregular patterns of people who are visiting your website via certain IP addresses. Then exclude them within your Google Ads platform by going into your settings.

The types of things that you would check for is repeat repeated IP addresses. So whereby you’re getting a lot of traffic from IP address, which is not converting. You might like to check the IP addresses locations to see where the IP addresses are actually from.

Any sort of anomalies that you might find within these IP addresses that you take a look at, monitor performance and look for anything unusual. Sometimes what could happen is that you might get spikes of traffic, and your impressions might still remain the same. But you’re your clicks, might just go through the roof while your conversions are remaining the same.

This could be a signal, something may be wrong. Now, apart from looking at the usual Google Ads campaign optimization, whether you’ve made any sort of incorrect moves within optimizing or building out your campaign. Check to see the sources of where this traffic is coming from.

One of the things to do is look at your IP addresses, look at the geo geo-locations just try to work out where this traffic is coming from and is it legitimate traffic or not. You can then take action accordingly.

Show you a geo-targeting is valid across all activities. Make sure that you know once we have VPNs, and you need to keep an eye on exactly where your traffic is coming from in terms of your locations.

This could be a signal to say why are we getting traffic from locations which we have not specified within our settings? Invest in automated click fraud detection systems.

Now, these systems use machine learning and complicated algorithms in order to work out who are the people are visiting?
Oh, clicking on the ads in the first place?
Are they your competitors?
Are the bots you know what locations are they coming from?

If the systems deem these potential visitors or click to add to be false or fraudulent, they will even prevent the ads from appearing to them.

As a result that you are saving a whole load of money by preventing click fraud.

Lastly, your gut instincts. If you feel that something is not right, then take a look at it. But if you ran it if you looked at your Google Ads account yourself.

You can’t find anything wrong, because you are getting all these clicks, and you’re getting a lack of conversions. Then one of the things that you can do, you can raise a ticket with Google Ads themselves. Google ads will investigate this for you.

They will come back with their findings.

If they find that you have had a click forward, they will even refund you the fraudulent clicks.

You also have the option in Google ads, to click on columns and enable the column called invalid clicks.

This will show you what clicks Google deems to be invalid, which they will not charge you on.

I’d love to hear from you what your experience of click fraud Google Ads. What sort of systems or processes you will use in order to minimize your click fraud.