PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

The severity of click fraud is different from industries to industries. Some PPC experts are dealing with competitive keywords with extremely high cost-per-click (CTR) everyday. All PPC managers would like to eliminate click fraud as the marketing budgets are being wasted every day. This is a major issue when it comes to your paid search campaign’s revenue and return-on-investment (ROI). However, there are always ways to spot click fraud.

#1: Identical IP Address

Checking the IP addresses of your visitors (clicks) is probably an old way in detecting click fraud, but it still works pretty well from time to time. You can do this by looking at your website’s log files. If you can see there is an IP address that has been clicking on your paid search ads over and over within the last 24 hours, record this trend immediately as this is definitely click fraud!

#2: Change In Number Of Clicks

Your keywords do not receive the exact number clicks everyday, but if yesterday one of your keywords got 5 times more clicks than it used to get on any other average days, not only you may run into problems with overall marketing budget, it is probably a sign to click fraud.

#3: Change In Clicks Over Impressions

Nowadays, there are still certain numbers of third-tier and even second-tier PPC service providers that do not provide impression data to advertisers. However, you can definitely have this information from the top-tier PPC platforms including Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.

For example, one of your keywords has always been receiving about 5% click-through-rate (CTR) on any average day. When all of a sudden yesterday its CTR ramped up to 40%, you should really take a look and figure out why. Unless very recently you have made major changes to your ads or your campaign budgets, such as major increase in CTR is never normal.

#4: Change In Bounce Rate

Bounce rate (or pageviews per session) of your visits is another measure that you should carefully look at. Make sure you monitor the daily bounce rate of your website. Unless you have made significant changes to your landing page, you will not have a major change in bounce rate – e.g. from 30% of yesterday to 90% of today.

#5: Short Duration Per Visit

The duration of click fraudsters on your web pages is often very short - under one minute! You should track the length of your visitors (clicks) and compare it to your average value. Now if the figures are happened to be just slightly off, it could be due to other reasons such as brand awareness or seasonal change.

Also, watch out for those click fraudsters who landed on your website and very swiftly click a couple on a couple of internal links of your website. They simply do this to disguise their intentions.

Final Word On Click Fraud

If any one of the above method alone cannot justify a click fraud situation, by combining all of them it will give you a much clearer idea with more convincing evidence.

Posted in: PPC