Ways to Indentify Click Fraud?
As a small business owner, you have used PPC advertising or maybe planning to use PPC advertising. If so, you need to be aware of a type of fraud that is prevalent in PPC advertising known as Web Site Traffic Click Fraud or the term Google uses, “invalid” click. In simple terms, it involves artificially boosting the number of clicks on the ads using either human beings or pre-written programs known as bots. As a small business owner, this will impact your business budget as well as advertising plans. Given below, is a list of things that can negatively affect your ROI (return on investment)
Tracking of advertising returns: When you calculate the revenue per click that is generated you will make mistakes, as you are now taking into account invalid clicks too. This may make you feel that your PPC advertising is not worth the money spent on it and you might abandon the campaign prematurely.
Financial loss: Pay per click advertising requires you to pay the search engine for each click on your ad. If people or programs who have no interest in your offers click on your ads then you end up paying the search engines money without any hope of financial gain. With the increasing number of online businesses competing with each other, keyword CPC (cost per click) have been steadily increased over the years. Many feel CPC is becoming out of reach for many small business owners.
But you need not worry too much as there are things you can do to protect yourselves from click fraud. First is to watch out for any sudden unusual activity in your web traffic without a corresponding increase in sales. This is a clear indicator of Web Click Fraud is happening and you need to immediately alert your search engine about this.
You can also engage the services of a third party fraud detection monitoring firm to analyze your web server logs and identify the clicks that did not originate from a genuinely interested party. You can then submit these results to your search engine and ask for a refund. But remember that the upper hand lies with the search engine and you may need to really fight it out before your claims are accepted.
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