What To Do About Click Fraud?

There are a variety of best practices, services and technologies
available to identify and protect yourself against click fraud.
Know Your Pay-Per-Click Vendor
Before signing up for a pay-per-click program, research where and how
your sponsored listing will appear. If your listing appears on obscure
web sites that seem irrelevant to your potential site visitors you may be
exposing your self to click fraud. Many pay-per-click programs provide
the option to include or exclude affiliate properties. Make sure you are
comfortable with where your sponsored links will appear. Not only
will it mitigate click fraud, but it helps you control your brand.
Develop a Baseline
Establish expected results for your site visitor behavior from pay-perclick
programs. Many live web site statistics products are available
that are affordable and easy to implement. These online services
typically provide hundreds of web site statistics, pay-per-click
conversion tracking, visitor behavior and more. It is important to have
comprehensive reporting to establish your baseline. Repeat visitors by
campaign are not enough to determine whether the clicks are from a
customer, prospect or an erroneous visitor with the intent of click
fraud.
ANALYZE your Navigation Paths to determine what paths your visitors
usually take. Unusual and repeated paths from a repeat visitor may be
a spider trying to trick you.
LOOK at the Page Depth and Average Time spent per page for your
visitors. Repeated visits with minimal page views and short time spent
per page may again be a spider clicking on your sponsored links.
REVIEW visitors by country to identify increased traffic from suspicious
countries of origin. Unusual patterns in visitor traffic by country may
be a sign of outsourced click fraud.
ANALYZE your referrals by search engine and search term. Make sure
the referral source for your pay click visitors appears valid. Check
these referral sources to make sure your ad is appearing. If you are
getting clicks from a search engine, but don’t see your ad, you may be
a victim of an affiliate scam.
KNOW your typical pay-per-click conversion rates. Review your
campaign activity summary reports to identify any underperforming
pay-per-click campaigns. Make sure to compare these to similar
campaigns over the same time period. All else equal, you should get
similar results from similar search terms with similar ad copy.
Implement Click Fraud Detection Technologies
Tracking repeat visits by IP address from your pay-per-click campaigns
is your first line of defense against click fraud. Comparing this data to
information such as number of visits, page depth and minutes per
session are ways of identifying suspicious activity from your pay-perclick
marketing programs.
You may consider SETTING UP EMAIL ALERTS to notify you of multiple
clicks from the same IP address. By proactively monitoring and
reporting click fraud you can do your part to stem the flow of
erroneous charges to search engine marketing budgets.
In addition, there are some ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES from a variety
of vendors that incorporate sophisticated statistical models that can
analyze your site activity and “predict” potential click fraud behavior.
Beyond the first line of defense these techniques can assist in
identification of click fraud that may go undetected by the human eye.
If your budgets dictate, there are also PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
available to audit the performance of your pay-per-click programs.
These programs are comprehensive and provide a definitive method of
identifying click fraud. If your company has spent hundreds of
thousand of dollars or even millions on pay-per-click and feel they
have been victimized, this option will allow them to look back, identify
and quantify exposure to click fraud.
These items listed in this section are suggestions for steps to take.
They do not constitute a complete list of methods and techniques for
the detection of click fraud.