Is Click Fraud Being Dealt With?

Making money online is a challenge in any business. If you are using pay per click advertising, then this effort can be made more difficult by click fraud. Click fraud is where an individual will click on your pay per click link with no intention of buying, or for that matter even looking at the product that you are selling. The fraudulent browser is most likely doing this in order to bring in more Adsense revenue, or simply to punish a competitor.

The first indication of likely click fraud is a sudden surge in clicks without any increase in conversions. All clicks and no selling. This can take the wind out of the sails of many online merchants. The question is; why are these people clicking? The most obvious answer is that your PPC ad has ended up on someone's web page as an Adsense ad and they are clicking on it to make more money. It could also be a competitor, trying to drain your advertising funds. It might just be idle vandalism.

Unfortunately, the big companies like Google who offer PPC advertising seem to make money regardless of whether the clicks are fraudulent or genuine. In fairness to Google, they have instituted four layers of security to try and catch click fraudsters. Most of the people who would click Adsense ads illicitly, like those fraud artists mentioned above, would be caught by these security measures.

There are however, very sophisticated groups of criminals who would be more difficult to catch. These individuals will target the more expensive keywords, assuming correctly that Google will pay out more in Adsense payments for these keywords. These people may be smart enough to keep their CTR low by means of using a lot of non-competitive keywords in their web site, or even just in some sections of their web site. They may use pay to read groups to click on keywords and manipulate traffic to their site. Innocent individuals may also be lured to the more lucrative keywords under false pretenses. This will create the illusion of normal traffic patterns.

So, what can online merchants do to protect themselves? Some might point out the obvious fact that the most expensive keywords are also the most attractive to fraudulent criminals. If you have already concluded that the higher cost keywords are essential to your advertising effort, it's unlikely that you'll want to change that. A useful piece of advice is to make sure that your demographic targeting is well focused. If your PPC ad campaign is aimed at your most likely customers and their most likely geographic localities, this will do a lot to undermine the efforts of well organized fraud artists.

Another important consideration in protecting against click fraud is that proper tracking tools should be installed and activated on your web site. These tracking tools will allow you to identify exactly when a spike in clicks happened. Tracking tools can also help identify the IP or IP range and the browser of the individual who is clicking. This can create a record of patterns to help verify a clicking campaign. If there is an upsurge in clicks and not in sales, then you may have a case of click fraud. The information gleaned from tracking tools can support your claims of fraud when approaching the advertising company. There are companies on the Internet that will do this tracking work for you. Search for tracking services to find them online.

Although click fraud remains a threat and a problem, if you take active measures to protect yourself, then the odds of your being victimized will be lessened considerably.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Fraud

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