Google Ads (formerly known as Adwords) can be a great way to earn some useful clicks. The procedure to use the Google Ads is called PPC (Pay-per-click) and its name mentions its usage. When you are spending your hard-earned money, then you wish to get the best results. But, sometimes there are fake clicks that are targeted at your business. They want to exhaust your money but do not get the best results.
Some fraudsters target the business irrespective of their size or budget and only the specialized PPC professionals can recognize these fraud clicks and tackle them.
What Is Google Doing?
Google monitors such type of suspicious activity. When malicious clicks are detected, they are marked as “invalid activity” and not charge for that clicks. Credits are issued to the your ads account.
Although Google investigation system is not perfect. But, It is still better than nothing.
But, a normal Digital marketer can use some techniques to recognize such activities and stop these fake clicks.
Find out the Click Fraud
It is not tough to recognize the culprits who commit fake clicks, because they are your competitors. You may know them with their marketing techniques. The competitors want you to spend all your money quickly, and remove your ads. Then they can put their ads and get the maximum clicks for themselves.
You can identify click fraud in your account such activities.
Go to Internal reporting:
- Get the information of the IP Address, Click timestamp, Action timestamp, and User-agent. click timestamp mentions the site arrival time, action timestamp mentions that time when the user completed an action. User-agent is the device from which the website was accessed.
- If you review the action timestamp and click timestamp, then you can see such IP addresses that came to the website frequently using the ads but did not commit any action. If there is such an IP address that has a click timestamp innumerable time, but a pretty lower action timestamp, then you can deduce that it is a fishy user forcing your money out of your budget.
- User-agent will show which kind of device was used and the internet browser.
If you want to gain more information, then you will need the assistance of some professional tools like Improvely or Clickcease to record and process the IP address of the website visitors.
Example-
Improvely shows the detailed report of each IP address visited the website. You can click on the IP address and view a detailed list containing all visits and conversions from the given IP address.
There is People Explorer in which you can input the IP address and it will bring the profiles of the users who have come to the website and by clicking on their IDs, you can get the conversion rates too.
Stop Competitors Clicking on Your Ads
But, if you use the below mention method, then you can create a workaround to stop such activities.
Exclude IP addresses
In the Google Ads settings section, there is the option for the IP Exclusion where you can input the IP address of the competitors and block it from visiting the site.
In the menu list of the left of the page, go to settings, then click Campaign settings, then Additional settings. In the IP Exclusion section, input the IP address and click Save. Now, the user with the given IP address cannot see the ads.
Restructure Your Campaigns
Generally, fraudulent clicks are committed from different countries due to the availability of cheap labor. So, Restructuring your marketing campaigns can exclude the location from which the competitors target your ads, It will save you a lot of money, and ads will not be visible in unwanted countries.
Remarket Your Marking Campaigns
If you are concerned about publisher based click fraud, then re-marketing is the best option. You can easily avoided with re-marketing because they can’t see your ads. You can reduce the effects of the fraudster clicks.
Invest in a Professional Fraudulent Tracking Software
As mentioned above the example of fraudulent tracking software, you should invest in the professional software that not only tracks the frauds but stop them from accessing the website.
PPC advertising is a crucial marketing activity that requires a capital amount to invest in marketing for your business. If you follow the best techniques, then you can get the optimum results, and eliminate click fraud in your Google Ads account.
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The method to stop the fraud clicks is best when you stop the competitor’s IP address. Thanks for giving both manual and tool-based solutions. I also want to stop the false click on my ads as they were sucking my money.
I was getting lots of clicks yet no conversions, but was not enlightened about unfair practices of competitors, your article has bring so much sanity, thanks for this super useful blog.
Thanks for sharing “Useful post”, You are amazing Sir…..