Marketers know today that PPC advertisement is an effective method and tool to drive traffic to your website but also you have a higher search visibility and consumer conversion. A targeted PPC campaign can be an ideal way of boosting your online traffic, it is still vulnerable to fraudulent activities from unethical marketers that will abuse the PPC model on PPC programs, like Google AdWords, to sabotage their competitors. Click-fraud can cause much damage to your campaign but as well as your marketing budget. Click-fraud is a method that competitors might use if they are frustrated seeing their competitor’s ads appear more over their own. This is a serious issue that if gone unnoticed, click-fraud will drain your budget or even worse give the wrong impression that your campaign is successful and have a bigger budget installed, creating a bigger problem.
By using people or bots to commit click-fraud on competitors, fraudulent marketers will spend all of your daily budget before you can even reach your true potential clients. This scheme also allows advert display networks which can accumulate a large number of false commissions. This can occur by having bots collect data about adverts, then using other bots to click these adverts generating a vast amount of fraudulent revenue. In the end, the company who is paying for PPC advertising efforts are getting a huge number of clicks when in actuality they are not getting the results from actual conversions. Completely getting rid of click-fraud is impossible at this time, however, here are some tips to minimize the damage of click-fraud and getting more out of your PPC budget.
- Targeted PPC Keywords– The most useful way of dealing with this type of fraudulent activity is to bid on only the most industry-specific keywords. This will minimize the total of false clicks on your campaign. These specific keywords will increase your traffic and ensure that large amount of the clicks you receive will be from customers and not from bots. AdWords Keyword Planner is a great tool to use to research PPC keywords.
- Monitor User Behavior- Being able to identify click-fraud is the first step to preventing more damage from it. To maximize your ad value and weed out the false clicks, you should create a habit of checking your PPC program every day. This will only be one more step to when you check the PPC program to see which keywords and ads that are giving you the most positive results. If you are using Google AdWords, look at the dimensions, reaches, and frequency. By looking at the frequency and reach, you will be able to tell if the majority of your clicks are coming from a single IP address or browser. Another sign you can detect if you are a victim of click-fraud is by cross-checking the repeat click-through against the bounce rate for the day.
- Establish Your Budget- After creating long tailed keywords for your campaign, create a bidding strategy that will fit your budget. Set a maximum cost-per-click bid so that there isn’t any increase in your budget through accidental spending. Also setting up a maximum daily PPC budget will allow you to never spend more than a certain about for that day.
Setting a budget for your campaign can minimize the damage of fraudulent activity and be aware of click frauds through an irregular increase in clicks in a particular time period. With these methods, it will help reduce the damage of click frauds and analyze your AdWords campaign with more accuracy.