PPC fraud
From ArticleWorld
An abrupt increase in click through without conversion growth is a first indication of click fraud. All clicks and no selling. This can stop many online sellers. The mystery is; why are these people clicking more? The most obvious answer is that your PPC ads (Pay Per Click ads) have ended up on another person's website as Google Adsense ads and they are clicking repeatedly on it to make a lot more money. It may also be a business competitor, who is trying to deplete your advertising funds. It may be just be vandalism.
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How the top search engines act against click fraud
Unfortunately, the larger companies like yahoo or Google who offer Pay Per Click advertising seemingly make money regardless of whether the clicks are fake or real. To be fair to Google.com, they have put in 4 layers of security to try to catch click fraudsters. A majority of the people who would click Adsense ads illicitly, such as those frauders pointed to above, would be caught by these stricter security measures.
How to protect your business against click fraud
So, what could online businesses do to protect themselves? Some might point out the obvious truth that the most expensive keywords are also the most attractive to fraudulent criminals. If you've already reached a conclusion that the more expensive keywords are essential to your advertising effort, it is not probable that you'll want to change that. A important piece of advice is to make certain that your market target is well focused. If your PPC advertisement campaign is focused in on your most probable buyers and their most probable geographic localities, this will go a long way to greatly undermine the attempts of well organized underground fraud scammers.
How hackers bypass PPC security
Even so there are, highly groups of hackers and criminals who could be more challenging to catch. These individuals will target the very expensive keywords, believing correctly that Google will pay out more payments for these highly thought after keywords. These individuals may be smart enough to keep their CTR low by utilizing a lot of less competitive keywords in their pages, or even simply in some sections of their sites. They might utilize pay to read groups to continue clicking on keywords and manipulate traffic to their site. Innocent individuals might additionally be pulled to the more expensive keywords under false advertising. This would then create the illusion of normal traffic stats patterns.
Click fraud tracking softwares
An additional significant consideration in protecting your business against click fraud is that good tracking and stats tools should be installed and used on your web site. These tracking tools will allow you to identify exactly when a spike in clicks happened. Tracking and stats tools will also help identify the IPs or IP scope and the browser of the individual who is clicking. This can render a record of patterns to help confirm a Pay Per Click campaign.
If there is an upsurge in clicking and not in sales, then you may have a case of click fraud. The patterns picked out by tracking tools can support your claims of fraud when approaching the complain service of the advertising company. There are various companies on the Web that will take care of this tracking for you. Search for keywords such as 'tracking services' to discover them on the Internet.
Although click fraud is still a threat and a problem, if you take thoughtful precautions to protect your business, then the odds of your being victimized will be reduced considerably.