When promoting your business, an attractive option is to use pay-per-click advertising.  Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising you can bid for placement in the search engines for the keyword phrases you know your customers are using when they are searching online.  The most commonly known PPC platform is Google’s Adwords program, although Microsoft and Yahoo also have well established PPC programs in place.  While top organically ranked listings are still the Holy Grail of search engine marketing, PPC advertising is a fine way to fill in the gaps of your organic listings as well as offering alternative ways to get in front of your audience.

Description of Click Fraud

The basic description of click fraud is when somebody intentionally generates multiple clicks on the same PPC ad – whether manually or by means of an automated process.  Since you only need to click a PPC ad one time to arrive at the landing page for the ad and each click to the ad costs a PPC advertiser money, these unnecessary extra clicks only serve a malicious purpose – to cost the PPC advertiser more money.  Some explanations of click fraud are obvious – your competitors are trying to exhaust your marketing budget, for instance.  But just like gibberish spam emails, other explanations can also exist.  The important thing to realize, is regardless of the explanation, if you are a PPC advertiser and you have click fraud perpetrated against your PPC campaign, you are being stolen from.

Click Fraud Protection

The search engines have click fraud protection methods in place to minimize click fraud.  The easiest method is recognizing multiple clicks coming from the same IP address.  In this case, these additional clicks from the same IP address are thrown out and not counted against your PPC budget.  This can also protect you from unintended click fraud where a legitimate user is comparison shopping and might reclick your ad multiple times during their session.

Do Search Engines Encourage Click Fraud?

Many speculate that the search engines encourage click fraud as they would stand to gain from the extra clicks as they get to bill their advertisers more money for all those bogus clicks.  I disagree with this opinion, as the search engines know that click fraud dilutes the effectiveness of a PPC campaign.  This in turn diminishes faith in the service and minimizes advertisers and their budgets.  A short term gain from click fraud revenue for the search engines would quickly lead to long term suffering as advertisers jump ship.  That being said, and with the protections in place from the search engines, it is a fact that click fraud still happens as scammers find new ways to beat the system.

How to Identify Click Fraud?

Becoming familiar with how to monitor your campaign statistics via your PPC management console is the first step.  If you or the person in charge of your campaign is not viewing the data, you won’t know what is going on.  Viewing the click through rates for each of you keyword phrases and how they change over time can indicate fraudulent activity.  If you have a keyword phrase that for the past year has averaged a 2.4% click through rate and now has suddenly spiked to 9.7%, although you have not recently optimized the campaign, this could be an obvious tip-off.  If you have conversion tracking in place for your campaign and the increase in click through rate actually leads to a decrease in ROI, this is another obvious clue.  Note that increasing your click-through rate is an end goal for your campaign, but usually happens when you are actively optimizing your campaign.

You can also use data that is external from your PPC management console, such as the statistics tracking tools that come with your hosting plan or Google Analytics.  Checking for multiple clicks from the same IP address or clicks from outside your target market area could indicate click fraud.  For example, if your are only marketing your campaign within a 25 mile radius of your zip code and you are getting an unnaturally large number of clicks from Korea, this could indicate click fraud.

What to Do if You are a Victim of Click Fraud?

The first step is to report it to the search engine your PPC campaign is with.  If the suspected click fraud is only occurring on certain keyword phrases in your campaign, you may want to consider pausing these keyword phrases in your campaign until you get things straightened out.  If it is a Google PPC campaign, you may find that the questionable clicks are originating from your ads on the Google Content Network.  Temporarily pausing ad placement on the Content Network until you can resolve the issue with Google is a good idea.  You don’t want to let click fraud kill your online marketing altogether, but tending to bleeding areas is crucial and can help revive your results.

Last month I touched on RSS feeds – what they are and how to use them (See RSS Feeds – How To Guide).  I wanted to expand upon RSS a bit more and how RSS will continue to play a bigger role in your online world. In this instance, I want to talk about how RSS gives you another avenue to promote your business.

If you are currently involved with Google Adwords (PPC, or Pay-Per-Click), you may be familiar with the Google Content Network.  This is where in addition to displaying on Google search result pages, you can have your Adwords display on other websites that are included in the Google network (AdSense).  Now Google Adwords can display within a RSS reader.  Get a feed about a particular RSS piece of information and you may see a related ad displayed near the posting – your results may vary, depending on what RSS feed reader you are using and where you’re getting the feed from.  Love it or hate it for a user’s point of view as it clutters your reader with ads, it is yet another tool to market your business.

It is a fairly new rollout from Google (earlier this year) and they just released some new functionality within the last week, but it is worth keeping in mind for your Adwords campaign.  As RSS feeds become more mainstream, its worth will likely continue to grow.

My prediction is that it will be viable for some but not everyone.  Just like the high impression/low click through rate of the Google Content Network, it will still take testing to determine if this option for Adwords nets you a good return.  But it’s good to have options.