How To Protect Yourself From Click Fraud on Your PPC Campaigns
Imagine this: you launch a Google Ads campaign with high hopes, carefully selecting your target audience and locations. The clicks roll in, the CTR looks promising, yet your lead generation remains stagnant. You meticulously review your settings, finding no errors. The question lingers: where are all these clicks coming from? The answer, unfortunately, could be click fraud, a silent but costly threat to your PPC campaigns.
Don’t worry, below you will find some tips and tricks to help mitigate this.
What Is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is when spammy traffic (from bots, spammers, click farms, VPNs, angry competitors, etc.) results from clicks on your ads, costing you real advertising dollars on wasteful traffic.
For years, advertisers have been experiencing this problematic phenomenon—and it’s getting worse. In 2024, click fraud rates in search campaigns ranged between 14% and 22%, depending on industry and geographic location.
As someone who professionally manages Google Ads and Programmatic campaigns, I’ve noticed this on some of my client accounts. After much investigating, I’ve discovered a specific way to spot click fraud, but you can’t rely on Google Ads to identify it for you. You have to use Google Analytics (GA4) to be sure. Here’s how!
How Do You Spot Click Fraud?
Detecting click fraud takes some data sleuthing. Google doesn’t make it easy to spot fake clicks, and they don’t show you the actual cost. Follow the steps below to spot click fraud, so that you can take action to fix it.
In GA4, select Reports -> Acquisition -> Acquisition Overview. Then, scroll down and select “View Google Ads campaigns” and click the + button in the first column. Select “Geography -> Country” to see what countries your traffic is coming from.
In the above screenshot, you can see that users are shown under the User column, which means someone got to the website by clicking on an ad.
As in the previous example, the Google Ads campaigns were set up to only target inside the US, yet traffic from outside the country was spotted, indicating that click fraud was taking place.
If your Google Ads are strictly targeting people physically located in the US, but your Google Analytics is showing Google Ads traffic from outside the U.S., there is a problem with click fraud coming from outside the targeting area.
How to Fix Click Fraud
Now that you know how to spot it, there are some precautions you can take, along with some solutions.
We’ve been using a third-party service called ClickCease, and so far it’s been effective at blocking fraudulent traffic. It identifies the spammy traffic on your ads via their IP address. Once that is done, it adds them to a block list, so they can no longer click on your ads.
There’s a cap of five hundred slots for IP addresses to be added to in Google Ads so that you can block a finite number of IP addresses at a time. Also, fraudulent traffic changes, especially with VPNs. Block lists will change over time and need to be updated, and this is something that ClickCease does.
I worked on a different account once where the client had a dedicated in-house IT staff. They manually identified click fraud on their accounts by going into their web servers using advanced techniques to view and create a list of the IP addresses of their paid website traffic. Over time, they could infer which IP addresses weren’t behaving normally and showed evidence of click fraud. Then, they could manually add those IP addresses to their campaign’s exclusion list.
The screenshot below shows where you would add those IP addresses. This is a considerable amount of work and requires a lot of IT experience to accomplish.
Protect Your PPC Campaigns Today
Click fraud poses a growing threat to ad campaigns across multiple industries. While platforms like Google and Facebook work to improve click fraud detection, their systems aren’t flawless. It’s up to digital marketers to implement proactive strategies for click fraud prevention and make the most of their ad budget.
If you’re serious about improving traffic quality and protecting your campaigns from fraudulent clicks, start by investing in better tools, monitoring your data closely, and staying vigilant about suspicious activity. Taking these steps today ensures your advertising dollars reach the potential customers that matter most.
Need expert advice? Contact us at Cordelia Labs.
FAQs about Click Fraud
Who Is the Most Likely to Be Affected by Click Fraud?
Click fraud can target any advertiser, but small to mid-sized businesses using PPC advertising are particularly vulnerable. Industries with highly competitive keywords, such as digital marketing, real estate, or legal services, are notable targets. Small businesses and startups have limited online advertising costs, and click fraud can quickly erode their return on investment (ROI).
To add to the challenge, social media platforms and ad networks like Facebook and Google have different methods for handling fraudulent clicks. While these platforms have fraud detection algorithms, they aren’t foolproof, and the responsibility to monitor invalid activity often falls to advertisers.
What Is Google’s Policy on Click Fraud?
Google prioritizes traffic quality and employs advanced fraud detection systems to identify and filter out fraudulent activity. However, it isn’t perfect. Google Ads utilizes strict penalties for advertisers engaging in ad fraud and has mechanisms for reporting invalid clicks.
Yet, advertisers still report losing substantial amounts due to underreported suspicious or invalid activity. Platforms like Google won’t always detect bot clicks or malware designed to bypass their filters. This is why tools and strategies for click fraud protection are critical, besides relying on the search engine itself.
What Is the Cost of Click Fraud?
Click fraud can have far-reaching consequences for your PPC campaigns beyond wasted ad spend. Here are several ways you might feel the impact:
- Lost Advertising Budget: Fake clicks take money away from real audience engagement.
- Lower ROI: Inflated metrics, such as the number of clicks, might look good in your reports, but they won’t translate into tangible results like better conversion rates.
- Decreased Rankings: Poor campaign performance can negatively affect your campaigns’ rankings on search result pages.
For example, studies have shown that ad fraud on search campaigns can account for 14% to 22% of ad traffic, depending on the industry and region. With billions spent on ppc ads, this represents a significant drain on global advertising costs.
What is the best way to avoid click fraud?
While click fraud is complex to eliminate entirely, there are several strategies to implement click fraud prevention and safeguard your campaigns.
- Use Advanced Google Analytics Tracking: Google Analytics, especially the newer GA4 version, allows you to detect abnormalities in ad traffic. Cross-check your AdWords data with traffic sources. If you notice suspicious activity, such as visitors from regions you haven’t targeted or unusual bounce rates, you might be experiencing click fraud.
- Monitor IP Addresses: Identify IP addresses or patterns contributing to invalid traffic. Tools such as Google Ads allow you to exclude specific IPs manually. However, this process can be time-consuming and has limits.
- Invest in a Third-Party Click Fraud Detection Tool: Platforms like ClickCease and PPC Protect specialize in monitoring and blocking fraudulent clicks on your campaigns. These tools can help automate fraud detection and add suspicious IPs to exclusion lists in real-time, ensuring click fraud protection around the clock.
- Set Click Caps: Limit the number of ad clicks per session or user by configuring settings in your campaign manager. This ensures that no single visitor can drain your advertising budget repeatedly.
- Evaluate Your Ad Placements: Analyze where your ads are showing. Avoid low-quality websites from poorly managed ad networks. Running your ppc ads on trusted platforms ensures cleaner traffic.
- Educate Your Team or IT Staff: Your team should understand the risks of ad fraud and how to identify fraudulent activity. Larger organizations may use in-house professionals to monitor servers for botnet traffic and other abnormal user behavior at deeper levels.
What are some examples of different types of click fraud?
Some examples of click fraud include:
- A competitor hires a click farm or uses bot clicks to inflate your campaign traffic and cause higher ad spend.
- Facebook ads generate high ad clicks, but upon closer inspection, most sessions have a bounce rate of 100%, showing no genuine interaction on your webpage.