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Spam or fraudulent clicks can be a leading reason why businesses and nonprofits don’t utilize Google Adwords to promote themselves. It’s an understandable reasoning for a organization to have if they don’t have much knowledge of pay-per-click campaigns. Spam and fraudulent clicks can occur, but they can also be avoided. Continue reading to learn solutions on how to cut down on the amount of spam and fraudulent clicks you receive.
What are fraudulent clicks?
Fraudulent clicks generally come from competitors and ad publishers looking to get something from your ads. Competitors will repeatedly click on ads to cap out your daily budgets and ad displayers are clicking on ads to give themselves more money. For years, search engines didn’t do much about this, but now they are.
What Google is doing
Of the search engines, Google is doing to the most to decrease fraudulent clicks. Google has created filters to detect fraud and prevent advertisers from wasting money. Google also has Google’s Ad Traffic Quality Team, which manually analyzes clicks before the advertiser is charged, and they investigate when you file a report of invalid clicks. If you use Google Adwords, you can block IP addresses with their feature, IP Exclusions.
How to run your own investigation?
Three things you’ll need are the IP address, click timestamp, and action timestamp. If you see a lot of clicks from a particular IP address and no conversion, there’s a high chance they were fraud clicks.
It might not be fraud
It’s important to note that not every questionable click is fraud. You may just need to adjust your ad targeting. Your targeting could be so broad, which is why you’re receiving a lot of clicks but not a lot of conversions.
Do you need help running an effective pay-per-click campaign? Call Sperling Interactive at 978-304-1730. We can help stretch your marketing dollars further.