Do you often find yourself blowing your Google Adwords budget on a monthly basis? Did you witness your money completely dissolving, but your ads not performing? Don’t fire your marketing manager, just yet, it may just be that you are a victim of a technique called Click Fraud.
Click Fraud is a “black hat” practice in which a person, with malicious intent imitates the behavior of an user and clicks on the ads of his or hers competition in order to spend their advertising budget and to end their campaigns faster with no intention whatsoever to conduct business with the advertiser.
The usual suspects of Click Fraud
There are three categories of suspects that usually use such fraudulent techniques to sabotage an ad campaign. The first category is comprised of competitors. They usually employ such practices to push you out of the market and to drive up your costs just to make life harder and to make you spend more time managing your campaigns. You can stop such behaviors by blocking your competitor’s IP from your Google AdWords account, but sometimes this proves not to be the complete solution.
Another category of people that try to drive up your marketing costs are actually the ad publishers themselves. They click on the ads published on their websites to make them look more attractive for ad placement, thus earning more money.
Employees and customers are both in the third category. Customers can click on your ad repeatedly just so that they can navigate your website faster and reach the landing page they desire and your own employees employ the same behavior when they feel a bit lazy.
The right tools to stop and prevent Click Fraud
Usually it is quite hard to combat Click Fraud, especially if a competitor or another person with malicious intent uses automated processes to destroy your advertising budget. Usually blocking the IP’s in your administrator account is a short-term solution that can be beaten quite fast if the fraudster knows what he is doing. That is why you need to employ the services of a team of specialists that know how to combat click fraud and has the right tools to help you.
ClickBrainiacs can offer you such services. We will start with an audit of your campaign and then we will use or in-house tool to block all suspicious IP addresses and to monitor your ads in real time to make changes and adjustments on the spot. Our tool allows for the possibility of manually blocking an address and also gives you email alerts if an address tries to do something wrong or suspicious.
Hunting click fraudsters and stopping such malicious behavior is something that we enjoy doing and have been doing for years. We made it our mission to help all our customers manage their ad accounts and marketing budgets and to help all the victims of Click Fraud. Come and meet the Sherlock Holmes’es of ad campaigns!
