How Do You Know if Pay Per Click Advertising Isnt a Scam

Important: If you think you are a victim of click fraud, be sure to get yourself protected with PPC Protect, the best click fraud detection software on the market.

Click fraud is one of the biggest threats to advertisers in 2021. With millions being lost to click fraud every year, it'due south nigh fourth dimension every marketer understood the dangers of this fraud. Discover the dangers of click fraud and how information technology affects everyone in this in-depth commodity.

How Click Fraud Is Costing Marketers Millions

The last two decades accept brought about a marketing revolution, with online advertizement completely changing the way businesses reach out to consumers. Idiot box ads and billboards are giving fashion to online advertising every bit the more traditional advertising methods are slowly fading abroad, and information technology's easy to see why:

Non but does online advertising permit businesses to reach more consumers for a fraction of the price, it also allows companies to target specific demographics. When combined with existent-time analytics, and the ability to closely monitor advertising spend, information technology'due south no surprise that online advert has become so popular. Online advertising has seen a wide diversity of advertisement models throughout its history; from banners with stock-still monthly fees, to ads that run on a cost per impression basis, and with models constantly evolving, advertisers are able to tap into the potential of online advertising like never earlier.

However, none of these methods come shut to the power and customizability which pay per click marketing offers yous. The ability to bring in billions of people every single day means that pay per click marketing is speedily becoming an essential marketing strategy for every business concern.

But wait! Earlier yous leave this page to sign up with a pay per click marketing company, it has a dark side you lot need to keep in mind.

With so many businesses all using pay per click advertising, and with money constantly changing hands, it has attracted an increasing number of fraudsters to the industry.

Known as click fraud, this activity can cause businesses to lose billions of dollars a year.

Thanks to the simplicity of click fraud and the corporeality of businesses using pay per click advertising, almost no one is prophylactic.

To give yous an idea of how click fraud costs businesses so much coin, we first need to take a await at pay per click advertising.

And in order to do that, we need to travel back to 1994 – the dawn of internet advertisement.

Pay Per Click Explained

The Simple Fashion and the Detailed Mode

If yous are new to pay per click advertising and aren't very technical, and then understanding information technology can be tricky, merely recall of information technology like this:

Imagine you ain a grocery store and you desire to advertise your products to potential customers in the surface area. With a small advert budget of a few hundred dollars, expensive advertising methods are certainly a no no. Instead, you make up one's mind to invest your budget into producing leaflets. Each leaflet produced costs yous a fixed amount of money with higher quality leaflets costing slightly more.

You put these leaflets on a stand outside your shop, equally well as placing them in other shops around the area. Subsequently a few days, you lot detect the average number of customers to your store has started to increase.

You become outside and run into that nearly all the leaflets you left exterior are gone. Information technology would be pretty prophylactic to conclude that: the leaflets placed outside your store and in other shops are alluring more than customers to your store.

Of class, the statistician in the group may point out that this could be random chance, simply you could ask customers how they heard of your business, or offering a discount for showing the coupon on purchase.

This is essentially how pay per click marketing works.

Online adverts are the leaflet and the cost per click is the cost of the leaflet. Displaying your advertisement on other websites using the Google brandish network is the online equivalent of leaving leaflets in other shops, and every fourth dimension somebody takes your leaflet information technology costs yous the production fee regardless of whether they end upward ownership from you or non. The aforementioned applies to the pay per click model.

Plain, there are some major differences in pay per click advertising, such as the ability to target specific demographics and an international audience. However, the leaflet illustration is even so a good starting point for beginners to understand the core concept of pay per click advert.

A More than Detailed Expect

To empathise how fraudsters abuse online advert it's important to understand how the diverse advertizement models work.

Pay per click marketing is past far the biggest online advertising model out in that location, and is used by hundreds of websites including Google, Bing and Facebook.

You lot might be wondering why search engines don't just charge a fixed monthly fee for their adverts, well here's why:

Unlike other online advertizement models, pay per click benefits both advertisers and publishers equally. Advertisers can split their upkeep between hundreds of keywords and have the ability to change them or adapt their spend at whatever time. Other methods such as fixed banned ads commonly require advertisers to commit to at least a full calendar month, or a minimum spend which doesn't offer every bit much flexibility. This allows advertisers to spend their budget in the places that give them the best return on their investment.

Publishers benefit from the pay per click model past using it to take reward of the abiding change in need for keywords. For example, you're not likely to detect many people searching "Christmas pudding recipe" in the middle of August.

But there are also plenty of keywords that can receive spikes in search volume due to sure events. A nifty case of this is Superbowl 50 back in 2016, when Coldplay, Beyoncé and Bruno Mars performed at the one-half time show, they all saw an increase in search book which led to a lot more anthology sales.

As you can see from the data taken from Google trends, each search term received a spike in traffic around the time of the Super Bowl. During that fourth dimension, it'due south common for certain keywords to increase in price due to the increase in need. If search engines used a stock-still model then advertisers would be paying the aforementioned price regardless of how much traffic they received. Plain, search engines are in the business to maximize their profits, which is exactly what pay per click ad helps them do.

And then how does the pay per click advertising model work?

Well, it's fairly simple.

Advertisers bid against each other to brandish their ads on a given search engine or network. Since Google and their pay per click service AdWords is the biggest and nearly popular network, nosotros'll be focusing on how their service works. Don't worry if you lot aren't a Googler though, almost every pay per click network is identical.

If you've been using Google regularly over the terminal few years then y'all'll notice that the height links are increasingly becoming sponsored results. Wait at the screenshot on the correct.

Equally you tin see, there are 4 adverts displayed for the keyword "pay per click" at the height and three at the lesser, not shown in this image. The number of ads regularly changes with the popularity of a keyword, the maximum existence seven. It is adequately common for less popular keywords to only have a handful of ads at the top.

In this example, advertisers bid against each other to decide who takes the number 1 spot.

Every bit most people click the first link they come beyond when using a search engine, the top advertisement will get a neat deal more than clicks and the highest amount of traffic.

The bidding system allows advertisers to decide how much they are willing to pay per click with the results being updated in existent time. Going for the number ane spot is non always profitable though, equally you can unremarkably pay less money and still receive a overnice number of clicks.

Having this bidding machinery in place allows the market to determine how adverts are placed.

Information technology's important to note that in the Google bidding organisation it'south not e'er as simple as paying more than to become the acme spot. There are other factors at play, which this video explains:

What's all the fuss nigh?

What is Click Fraud?

Now that yous understand how pay per click advertising works, it is much easier to understand what click fraud is.

Click fraud is due to advertisers beingness charged for every click on their advertizement, hence the model's name. In 2017 lone, most 1 in 5 clicks on adverts were fraudulent, with the number slowly increasing every month.

To put it but, click fraud tin be defined equally:

The fraudulent clicking of pay per click adverts to generate fraudulent charges for advertisers.

Detect how the definition specifically mentions pay per click adverts. If the same fraudulent clicks took identify on a dissimilar model, say a cost per impression model, so it would be completely dissimilar as advertisers are charged every per i,000 views, regardless of how many clicks they go.

So how does click fraud work?

If we get dorsum to the leaflet analogy, and then it's the aforementioned as someone violent down all your leaflets.

Since they've ran off with your leaflets, how is anybody else going to hear about your store? They're probably non unless you purchase more leaflets which will cost you more coin. If y'all do determine to purchase more leaflets then what are the chances that the same person will come up and take them all once again?

As you can see, click fraud is a frustrating and demotivating problem.

Not only does click fraud drive up advertising costs for businesses, but it also skews analytical information which many companies rely on to make effective marketing decisions. Maybe y'all take a pay per click campaign with a really loftier converting and profitable keyword that delivers lxxx% of your sales. If that keyword suffers from regular click fraud without yous being able to detect it, then from a marketing perspective you might decide to get rid of it. From looking at your data the click through rate would be extremely loftier, while the conversion charge per unit would be extremely low. Since you go charged for every click, eventually the price of the ad will outweigh the turn a profit and you'll have to give up on it.

However, if you lot accept sufficient data and monitor the keyword closely, then there is a good chance you would find a change in performance, alerting yous to the fact that something shady might be going on with that keyword.

Dig a little deeper, and yous would notice multiple clicks from the aforementioned IP addresses or an influx of clicks from a high-adventure state yous don't even offer services in.

But who's doing this? Who exactly is responsible for these clicks, and what practice they get out of sabotaging you?

A look at who'due south clicking what

Who'southward Responsible for Click Fraud?

Click fraud can take many forms. From accidental clicks past genuine customers, to serious underground fraud groups. Every industry and business is affected differently by click fraud, and in that location is never only one party responsible. To understand who might be fraudulently clicking your ads, we demand to take a look at the four most common offenders.

Competitors

Threat Level: 8/10

What they proceeds: A competitive advantage by wasting your PPC upkeep

Responsible for the vast bulk of click fraud

One of the most common culprits for click fraud is almost certainly other businesses that compete on your terms. When it comes to pay per click advertising, everyone wants to be number 1.

No matter what keyword yous're bidding on, there'south a high gamble you won't be the only person doing so. When other businesses compete for the same keyword, it tin frequently turn into a ferocious boxing.

Many businesses will run pay per click campaigns with a daily budget in identify. Once this upkeep has been reached, the ad will plow itself off to terminate anyone from clicking it. Since a lot of businesses do this with their campaigns, other businesses can have advantage.

By clicking competitor'due south ads, businesses can waste material their advertizing upkeep and turn the advert off for the day. If a business is currently in position ii and can't beget to outbid position ane, then by repeatedly clicking the peak advert they tin waste product their upkeep. Eventually, whoever was in position number ii will take the top spot. This means extra clicks and actress traffic, all for free!

Although a daily budget spend is common for smaller businesses, some larger businesses won't use them. This means their adverts can ofttimes be subjected to a large amount of click fraud and financial loss. Virtually businesses who don't employ daily budgets will usually be huge multinational companies worth billions, so it won't exactly touch them that much. However, it is all the same possible for them to lose thousands a mean solar day on click fraud.

As yous can see, competitors have a potent motive to click on your ads. Not simply does information technology waste your money and skew your data, simply it also allows them to get more than clicks with very little effort.

Fraud Rings

Threat Level: 5/10

What they proceeds: Huge amounts of revenue

Just target expensive keywords backed by big companies

The last and about serious offender of click fraud is fraud rings. These big groups of people specifically target certain ad networks in order to extract the most amount of money in the shortest time possible. Using a huge array of automated programs, the group can generate millions of fraudulent clicks and views per solar day. There accept been many click farms reported around the globe with major rings being discovered in the Philippines and China.

In December 2016, the company White Ops, released a study exposing a huge fraud ring they dubbed "The Methbot Operation." This Russian criminal fraud group are reportedly making $3 – $5 million per day from fraudulent clicks and fake views.

The Methbot operation works in a similar mode to how webmasters click ads on their own website, but with the Methbot Operation it's takes taken to an entirely new level. Using thousands of unique IP addresses and domain names, the group tin can simulate thousands of clicks and views every day on their ads.

According to the study, the average cost per mile (per ane,000 impressions) for these ads ranged from $3.27 to $36.72. Considering the grouping is faking up to 400 1000000 views a day, that is a lot of muddied money.

The group was initially discovered in 2015 when White Ops noticed suspicious traffic affecting their client'southward ads. After investigating the source of the traffic, they chop-chop discovered over 852,992 unique IP addresses responsible for the operation. This led to constant monitoring of the network until they managed to slice together the unabridged fraud group.

This was unlike any fraud groups which have been discovered in the past. Not only was it much larger in scale, but it operated entirely differently.

Instead of relying solely on botnets to practise the work, the network was built from scratch using unique IP addresses rented from other companies. The estimated toll of the vast amount of unique IP addresses solitary is effectually $four million. That is coin most of u.s.a. can but dream of, merely when you're making that amount in a 24-hour interval it's pocket change.

Although the Method Bot Operation focuses primarily on video CPM ads, in that location is no doubt that at that place are other groups doing the same thing on pay per click ads.

Should this be a concern to you and your business concern? Not at all.

Currently, this is the biggest ad fraud group out there and they're focusing solely on impressions on video ads. This ways if you're using pay per click ads and so you lot won't be affected. Combine this with the fact that nearly fraudsters only target uncommonly expensive keywords and the chances are they'll never run across your ads. Y'all're much more likely to be the victim of click fraud from competitors and webmasters than from a fraud group.

Webmasters

Threat Level: half dozen/10

What they gain: More income from displaying ads on their website

Only applicable to those that use Google'due south network display option.

If none of your competitors are trying to take reward of your pay per click campaigns, and so there is a high chance that sure webmasters will be.

Almost any webmaster is allowed to brandish Google ads on their website. They only create an AdSense account and can kickoff displaying ads immediately. For every person who clicks on their advertizing they get 68% of the amount paid to Google. As y'all can imagine, if a keyword costs £10 a click and so that tin be a lot of money for a webmaster, even if it's a just a few clicks a week. Take a look at these suggested bid prices for pay per click keywords.

In social club to make more money, a webmaster will require more clicks. Sadly, instead of spending time developing and growing their website, many webmasters can exist tempted to click their own ads. These fraudulent clicks will still generate the aforementioned turn a profit as the genuine clicks, only are much easier to obtain. This means many webmasters volition purposely click their ads to give themselves a little bit more turn a profit. This can often be identified by a huge increment in the click-through rate of your display network ads.

Although this is a violation of Google's terms of service, at that place'southward no denying that it still happens.

However, webmasters only have an incentive to click ads on their own website. In order to brand your advert announced on 3rd political party websites, y'all need to enable the brandish network option. If yous don't enable this, and then your advert will merely announced on Google's search engine and won't be subject to this kind of click fraud. It'south basically a tradeoff, you get less traffic to your ads only besides reduce the number of fraudulent clicks.

After reading this y'all might be tempted to cease using the Google display network. However, it'south important to understand that this doesn't happen to everyone. Many webmasters will only target the expensive keywords, so if y'all're not bidding on any expensive keywords then yous're likely to exist safety.

Disgruntled customers

Threat Level: 4/10

What they proceeds: Revenge on the company through financial loss

Tin cause many problems, especially if you are bidding on expensive keywords

One of the least mutual causes of click fraud is frequently down to echo customers who volition click the same ad for a variety of dissimilar reasons. Sometimes a user volition click an advertizement and and then a few days later click the aforementioned advert once again.

This might be downwards to the fact that they forgot the website or because it just happened to catch their attending once more. Although this type of click fraud is rarely as malicious compared to some of the other reasons we've listed, it still costs businesses money. Ideally, you only want a customer to click your advert once so convert, but this is frequently non the instance. Sometimes it takes more than 1 click to convert a client which will naturally increase your average conversion cost.

This type of click fraud is rare and not really worth worrying about, especially when in that location are other forms of click fraud which are more probable to impairment a company'southward profits.

Allow'southward face up it, yous can't delight every customer. Some of them can hold piddling grudges against companies for a long time, and If you meet a dissatisfied client who knows a flake about pay per click, then they may purposely click the aforementioned advert to endeavor and get back at you. This tin can seem like a strange and childish manner to bear, merely anyone who's worked in retail will tell you of the bitterness some people can possess.

As stated above, this type of click fraud doesn't occur regularly. In order for a customer to do this, they would demand to understand how pay per click works, which instantly rules out a lot of people. The chances of this always happening to you is minuscule.

Who's hit the hardest?

The most afflicted Industries

Now you know the parties responsible for click fraud, it's also important to sympathize which industries are afflicted the most.

From advertising to engineering, every industry has its own unique differences, and when information technology comes to click fraud, in that location are clearly some industries that are more fraudulent than others.

This can be narrowed down to 2 chief factors: the average cost per click and the amount of traffic.

If fraudsters want to click your ad undetected, then they desire to make sure they are causing the well-nigh damage (or making the almost coin) while keeping nether the radar. If you lot're in a competitive manufacture that receives millions of clicks per day then finding a few fraudulent clicks seem like a fruitless task.

Compare this to a much quieter industry with a lower price per click, and the chance of click fraud is greatly reduced. Why would a fraud group target low cost per click ads when they can target much more than expensive keywords with a higher payout?

The Top 3 Nearly Affected Industries

According to a click fraud report in 2015 by Bloomberg, the three most affected industries are:

Finance: 22% of traffic is bot related.

Family: xviii% of traffic is bot related.

Food: xvi% of traffic is bot related.

What do all of these industries have in common?

Well for starters, they all have a relatively high cost per click. Finance is obviously a very competitive industry full of big mortgage advisors and financial companies. These companies accept lots of money to throw around and aren't afraid to spend plenty of greenbacks bidding on keywords. After all, everyone needs insurance, mortgages and personal loans, and so there is always high demand for them.

Combine this with the fact that the search volume is relatively high for these industries, and they cheque all of the boxes for an easy click fraud target. By having expensive keywords and a huge amount of traffic to hide themselves in, it's no wonder these industries experience the most click fraud.

Compare these categories to the 3 least affected industries and you'll find some major differences:

Sport: 3% of traffic is bot related.

Scientific discipline: three% of traffic is bot related.

Info: 2% of traffic is bot related.

You'll discover these industries don't have expensive keywords. Out of the three industries higher up, sport is likely to accept the nigh expensive keywords while info near certainly has the everyman.

Subsequently all, are website like Wikipedia going to pump millions into pay per click ads? The aforementioned applies to scientific discipline websites. Since there are billion-dollar companies backing them the chances are they won't be paying much for click per click.

In addition to the keywords existence relatively inexpensive, the search volume is also low compared to other industries. Both of these factors make these industries unsuitable for click fraud.

Non only are they unlikely to run ads, but when they exercise the cost per click is extremely depression. Some click fraud might happen from sure webmasters with ads on their site, merely if you were a fraud group and so it's probable you'd pick a more than profitable industry.

The Answer is Concerning

What are PPC Networks doing to stop it?

In lodge to combat the ascension of click fraud, many pay per click networks have developed their own systems to observe fraudulent clicks. The biggest pay per click network of them all, Google AdWords, has its own traffic quality center that helps reimburse users who endure from fraudulent clicks.

The center, known as the advertising quality center, tracks all the clicks for every advertizement in Google's large network. If for any reason the arrangement detects suspicious behavior, then information technology volition automatically refund the cost of the click back to the advertiser. From an advertiser's perspective, this is a peachy feature. Not but are your ads being constantly monitored for click fraud, just if the arrangement detects fraud, then it volition automatically refund you. This leaves the advertiser happy and gives Google a ameliorate reputation, letting people know they only let high quality traffic in their network.

This organization sounds great doesn't it? Well in reality, it's nowhere near as practiced.

The master trouble is the automatic detection organisation doesn't take hold of all of the fraudulent clicks, which means click fraud still occurs. Considering the corporeality of time and effort fraudsters put into their click fraud campaigns it tin be exceptionally hard to place every fraudulent click.

The automated programs and robots used by fraudsters are getting more and more than advanced every with every twenty-four hours that passes. In fact, some software is so advanced that it can perfectly simulate a user'due south click while avoiding detection. This means later on going through the entire detection process; some users volition still be charged for fraudulent clicks.

With this in mind, some advertisers invest a lot of money into investigating their pay per click traffic and checking if it is genuine or not. If they do observe a user spam clicking on their ads and it's not being picked up by Google'due south system, then they tin always study them to Google.

Google then receives the report and will cheque all the prove to determine if it was accounted an invalid click. If there is plenty evidence to suggest it is, and so the amount taken for that click will exist refunded dorsum to the advertiser's account.

This ways that although Google's organisation might non exist able to observe every fraudulent click, if you can gather enough evidence then you can get your coin dorsum.

With that covered, let'southward get into how you manually check your traffic for suspected fraudsters.

Let's Explore the Legal Aspect

Is Click Fraud Legal?

One of the start things that often springs to mind when you call up about click fraud is the legality of information technology. Other forms of fraud such as credit card and identity fraud are well-nigh certainly illegal and are punishable by upward to 25 years in jail. But what about click fraud? Has anyone always gone to jail over it? Is click fraud illegal?

Just like any offense, click fraud requires a lot of investigation to determine who the culprit is. Sometimes small amounts of click fraud frequently go unnoticed and are not picked upwardly on. Other times the corporeality lost by the fraud itself is non worth the costs of extensive legal action. This means that the authorities oft only target the biggest fraudsters that touch on multiples businesses and industries. These groups accept been around for so long that monitoring them and gathering prove is fairly easy. This is essential information government demand to collect in club to press charges. Although not anybody who commits click fraud volition get discovered or charged, the repeat offenders who do it on a large scale are much more likely to terminate up in problem with the police.

The Estonian gang leader Vladimir Tsastin was jailed in the US for running an international fraud group which amassed over $14 million in fraudulent activities. Afterward the FBI discovered his scheme in 2009, Tsastin was arrested in in 2011. Upon being establish guilty of money-laundering charges, Tsastin was extradited to the US in 2014 to face charges of wire fraud and calculator intrusion.

The scheme Tsastin ran was an online fraud ring that used millions of computers to click on advertiser'due south ads fraudulently. The gang bearded themselves as publishing companies that had agreements with advertisement brokers. They would publish advertiser'due south content on their website, promising that they would receive lots of clicks.

And in fairness they did receive a lot of clicks, but little did the advertisers know that they were completely imitation and came from computers infected past malware that the gang created.

Past hijacking these unsuspecting users, large amounts of traffic could be directed to web pages that had the adverts on. This allowed the gang to behave out hard to find fraudulent clicks which made them rich.

To date, Vladimir Tsastin is the only person to take been jailed on click fraud related charges. However, this doesn't hateful that jail fourth dimension is the just way to punish fraudsters.

When a company is responsible for click fraud, then it is usually the entire company that faces the charges and not a specific private. This ways that most click fraud cases are often settled by lawsuits betwixt advertisers and suspected companies who are behind the fraud.

In one case, Google sued the Texas visitor Auction Experts on suspicion of paying people to click on ads that appeared on their website. Overall Google estimated they had cost advertisers around $50,000 due to their click fraud scheme and eventually won $75,000 from the visitor in 2005. Although, this was a long time ago and today click fraud happens on a much larger scale. Not but are there more than cases of fraud, but the offenders are also harder to track.

Google have received some criticism for click fraud, and an interesting instance arose in March 2006, when Lane's Gifts and Collectibles sued Google themselves for not doing enough to finish click fraud. After a long trial, Google agreed to pay a $90 million settlement fund to the company for their financial loss. Despite this big payout, Google all the same maintained that they had a groovy reimbursement system, and that any advertiser could request an investigation into suspicious clicks.

Since the lawsuit, Google has put more than effort and money into ensuring clicks and traffic are of the highest quality. This is apparently a welcomed improvement, but with fraudsters coming upward with new ways to avoid detection every 24-hour interval, it'southward a constant uphill battle.

This may get complicated

How to Identify Click Fraud Yourself

Now you understand the foundations of click fraud and what it is, how tin you lot check your own campaign to see if you lot've been the victim of it?

Earlier you can analyze your traffic to run into where information technology is coming from, yous first need to collect enough data from your pay per click campaigns. This step can be fairly tricky. As part of Google'southward privacy policy, there is no way to place users through AdWords using their IP address. Instead, you lot'll need to work backwards from the people who have visited your website.

To find out who has visited your website you demand to pull upwardly your server logs. Depending on what spider web host and setup you lot have, this can exist plant in a few ways.

If you lot're using the popular cPanel platform on your server, so getting the list of IP addresses is relatively easy. If you lot're non using cPanel, then you'll have to Google around to find out how to obtain them.

Head on over to the main cPanel homepage and curlicue downwardly to the metrics tab. Yous'll notice a Raw Access section like in the film below.

Afterwards clicking the Raw Admission button you'll be direct to a new page where you can download the data.

As yous can see from the screenshot higher up there are 2 sections; daily logs, and monthly logs. You'll most probable desire to be downloading the monthly logs as information technology will give y'all plenty of data to work with.

Upon downloading the logs, you'll need to excerpt the file to your desktop or somewhere yous program on keeping them. You might need to download several months of information logs in the time to come then make sure it's somewhere yous'll recollect. The file itself won't open on its own due to the extension, so to open it y'all'll have to import information technology to Microsoft Excel.

If you open up the file in Excel, you lot'll be greeted with the import screen below.

Y'all'll get a preview of the data beneath so y'all know information technology's the right file you've selected. The offset column on the left should have all the IP addresses from the file.

Press the next push button at the bottom to move to the next screen.

This screen lets you choose how Excel will import the data. You'll want to brand sure you select the space delimiter every bit that'south how the standard log file is formatted. Excel will requite y'all a preview of the data below on how it's going to be imported. The data should be dissever into carve up columns as shown in the picture above.

On pace 3 of the import sorcerer, you'll want to go rid of the columns that don't have whatever information. In this instance, it volition mainly be columns two and three as they don't comprise any useful information at all. To practice this, select the column in the preview window and select the Do not import column (skip) radio push button, every bit shown in the image higher up.

Afterward pressing finish, Excel volition load all the information into their ain columns and you'll be left with something that resembles this:

As you can come across, in this example our log file has over 170,000 connections in August alone. If you accept a big website, then this could easily be in the millions or more.

Now you've got the data imported into Excel; it'southward time to try and place some offenders. Start off by selecting the kickoff column A and sorting it from A to Z, if a new window pops up be sure to tick expand selection. This arranges the IP addresses in numerical club which makes it much easier to work with.

At present comes the hard role.

You lot need to look for IP addresses that visit your website on a regular basis, preferably at least three or more times within a month. Now these may be regular users, but for now we are just finding suspected fraudsters, the adjacent stage is to run into if there is enough show to support the claim.

From looking at the screenshot to a higher place, you can see that nosotros accept identified a echo visitor. This user has connected to our website on three different days through the same month. Either they really love our website and its content, or they are up to something suspicious. You might be thinking: How do I know if this user came directly to my website or through of paid advertizing? Unfortunately, as Google does not reveal users IP addresses it is pretty much impossible to tell. Even so, if an IP address does come up dorsum as being suspicious and blacklisted, then the chances are you'll want them blocked from seeing your ads anyway.

Now we've you a suspected fraudsters IP accost, information technology's fourth dimension to head on over to IPAvoid.com and exercise some research on the address. This tool is keen for giving information about a user from their state to ISP and if they're blacklisted. All important information when information technology comes down to gathering evidence.

After entering the IP address into the blacklist checker, the results bring dorsum some interesting information. As you can see, the IP accost is actually blacklisted by 1 checker out of 96. Not a huge amount, but commonly users need to have a reputation equally spammers or do something fraudulent to get on 1 of those lists. The more important detail from the results is that the mobile visitor AT&T really uses this IP accost. This ways that it'southward not simply i user using this address, in fact it could be thousands or millions.

This brings up an important question: Should you block this IP address from seeing your ads if you could potentially block thousands of people?

In this instance, information technology's probably best to leave it unblocked. Sure, the IP accost is blacklisted but it's only 1 out of 96. If it was say, fifty out of 96 and then information technology might exist worthwhile doing and so. Withal, the amount of potential users you could terminate from seeing your advertizement past blocking this IP is not worth it.

After checking our logs again, we find another unusual IP accost. This accost has visited the website 6 times in the space of a month. Again, either they love your website, or they're repeatedly clicking your ads.

Later putting the IP address into the blacklist checker, nosotros become some interesting results. The first affair to notice is that the IP accost is on 3 blacklists which ways whoever has been using this address is probably upwardly to no skilful.

The second affair to notice is that the IP address comes from a company called Leaseweb Us. After checking their site, information technology seems that they provide servers to many clients across the world.

This could hateful a few things. Either someone is using the rented server as a crawler to browse websites, or they could potentially be using it for fraudulent activities. Whatever the case, information technology's clear to see that this IP address is non coming from a real homo and is nearly likely a bot. As a precaution, it'south probably best to terminate this IP address from seeing your ads.

Excluding IP Addresses From AdWords Campaigns

Now you've got a listing of suspicious IPs and have got enough evidence to suggest they are upwardly to no good, information technology'due south fourth dimension to block them.

To exclude IP addresses from seeing your campaigns yous beginning need to sign in to your account and go to the main dashboard. At the top click the Campaigns tab and go to the settings after you've select the entrada from the left-paw sidebar.

Once in the campaign settings, scroll down to the advanced settings and click the IP exclusions drib-downwards push button. And then click edit to begin inbound the IP addresses.

A new box will pop-upward where you tin can enter the IP addresses y'all don't want to see your ads. Close the box by clicking salve, and that's it. The IP addresses you've entered won't exist able to see your adverts from now on.

Although this method does stop repeat offenders from constantly clicking your ads, the whole process tin be very time consuming and boring. Some other problem is that with the limited amount of data it tin also be hard knowing when fraudsters start using different IP addresses. This requires even more than try equally you constantly need to bank check your logs and compare them to your ban list.

We're not sure about you lot, only nosotros'd rather be working on improving our pay per click campaigns than worry near click fraud. Thankfully there is a way to completely automate this procedure with even ameliorate results!

A Fancy Mode to Say Conclusion

Terminal Thoughts

As you lot tin can see, click fraud is a growing problem that affects millions of businesses worldwide, regardless of their size. Although the battle against click fraud has been ongoing for several years, fraudster are ever coming upwards with new ideas and methods to evade detection. Even Google's ain anti-fraud system can be evaded with the correct programming and knowledge. With click fraud continually on the rise, it's only a matter of time before you become a victim of it.

If you think yous've been a victim of click fraud on your pay per click campaigns, and so don't panic. If you can gather enough evidence to evidence the clicks were fraudulent, then there's a good chance the network will refund your money. Yet, doing this manually tin exist extremely dull and time-consuming. Obviously, this is not something you want to exist doing every unmarried 24-hour interval when monitoring your campaign, especially when you could be spending your time doing things that are more productive.

To help you win the fight against online fraudsters, we've created specialist click fraud detection software which completely automates the process for yous.

Having previously worked in the pay per click management manufacture for several years, we take experienced the terrifying effects of click fraud first hand. I mean solar day your campaign is making an impressive return and overnight information technology all of a sudden becomes unprofitable.

Having manually reviewed our server logs, we started to discover a blueprint of IP addresses and users that would regularly connect to our website. After tracking their location and details, information technology becomes easy to see that most of these IPs were the same people clicking on our ads over and over once again.

Blocking those suspicious IP addresses was piece of cake, and for a time it worked. Nevertheless, that didn't stop the fraudsters from thinking upwards new ideas. All they had to do was but go another IP address that wasn't banned and they could click our ads over again!

This meant that in order to cease the constant barrage of new clicks from new IP addresses every solar day; we had to constantly update our AdWords ban list. This took hours of intensive hard labor, but it had to exist done otherwise we would lose a lot of our budget. We knew there had to exist a simpler and easier way to fight these fraudsters.

And then came the genius idea: fight automation with automation!

If the fraudsters were using robots to automate all their clicks and fraud, then surely we could utilize something similar to fight dorsum.

After months of designing and evolution, nosotros have finally come with something that would assistance protect our ads from the abiding threat of click fraud.

PPC Protect is software we designed specifically to work with Google'southward AdWords network, the software combines a proprietary click fraud detection algorithm with our blacklist of known fraudulent IP addresses. Having monitored hundreds of clients pay per click campaigns over the years, we've built an extensive listing of IP addresses that fraudsters employ. By having this at the core of the software, we tin can automatically stop your adverts from appearing for these users. If they can't see your adverts, then they tin't click them and cost yous money!

Since in that location'south nothing stopping fraudsters from getting a new IP accost, we've also put a lot of effort into our detection algorithm. Past analyzing the incoming traffic from a pay per click campaign, we tin can monitor the frequency of clicks from a sure IP accost beyond hundreds of different campaigns.

By combining data from hundreds of campaigns beyond various industries, we can easily identify which new IP addresses fraudsters are using. Once we've got evidence to prove the IP accost is malicious, the software volition automatically add it to the blacklist and request a refund for any previous clicks you lot may have received. This helps keeps your ads protected without y'all having to spend hours a day sifting through server IP logs.

Salvage fourth dimension and money today with our sophisticated click fraud prevention software. To detect how much coin you tin can salvage with PPC Protect, sign upward to our complimentary 14-day trial beneath.

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Source: https://ppcprotect.com/blog/ad-fraud/what-is-click-fraud/

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