Marketers and business owners are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Pay Per Click (PPC) is easily the most effective way to generate traffic to your website. On the other hand, click fraud is rife.
For anyone who has been wondering whether the impact of click fraud and ad fraud makes PPC advertising less cost-effective, there is a definite case for the use of a fraud shield.
OK, so what does this mean, and how does a fraud-blocking PPC shield like this work?
The problem with click fraud
Most marketers these days are aware of the problems of click fraud and ad fraud on their PPC ads. These are both practices where clicks on paid ads, such as Google Ads campaigns, come from non-genuine sources and are often referred to under the catch-all title of ‘invalid clicks’ by the ad networks.
In the case of click fraud, this can cover any accidental or automated click that isn’t necessarily organised or orchestrated. So, this may include brand haters who just like to click your paid ads to annoy you and web scrapers or bots that might click on your ads for less malicious purposes.
Ad fraud often refers to the practice of an organised fraud campaign, usually incorporating an advertiser stuffing a site full of ads and then using a network of bots to inflate the views and clicks. These clicks then siphon advertisers’ budgets to the fraudulent publishers, losing advertisers billions of dollars a year.
Estimates of the costs of click fraud vary wildly, but as of 2020, research shows that $35 billion a year is a fair reflection of the impact. Our data also shows that around 90% of all advertising campaigns are affected by click fraud in some capacity.
In short, for most advertisers using PPC, fraudulent clicks on ads are a real pain in the butt. This non-converting traffic causes you to waste money and miss out on genuine customers.
So this is where you might consider the need for a PPC shield to block click fraud.
How a fraud shield can help
When you set up a pay per click ad on Google Ads or Bing, for example, you are paying for your ad to display either on a partner website, or as a sponsored result (ad) in the search engine pages.
The theory, of course, is that interested potential customers see this and click on them. The problem is that those paid ads are then wide open to fake clicks, with little to stop them, bar some measures by the ad platforms which many consider to be insufficient.
Using fraud shield technology like ClickCease allows you to monitor and block fraudulent traffic proactively.
By placing a piece of code in your site, ClickCease shields your ads from common fraud sources such as VPN and proxy traffic, duplicate IP addresses, click farm traffic, repetitive clicks from suspected competitors and more.
Using machine learning, and calling on a huge bank of data, ClickCease is the industry leading click shield technology. This isn’t just hyperbole, in fact ClickCease has been shown to be incredibly effective at blocking the bad guys while letting the genuine traffic in.
Check out these independent third party reviews for some genuine takes on how effective ClickCease is.
How preventing fraud clicks helps your ad campaign
If you’re in the ‘click fraud is collateral damage’ camp, there are a few things you should consider.
From our own data, we’ve seen that an average of around 14% of all clicks on PPC ads are from non-genuine sources. But, for some campaigns, this can go as high as 65%!
Yes, some businesses are paying 65% of their ad budget to fraudsters.
Assuming you’re in the average bracket, how much do you pay for PPC per month? Are you happy to be paying 14% of that to fraudulent practices? No, we didn’t think so.
When you block click fraud on your ads, this actually increases the amount of genuine customers who see your ads. So, you’re not just stopping the bad guys from clicking, you’re also getting more traffic from genuine customers.
And, as you’d expect, more genuine visitors means more potential for paying customers.
This fraud shield has been shown to improve the return on investment for the majority of our customers here at ClickCease.
How much is the potential spend from one new customer for your business? And how much is the potential new customer lifetime value? When you examine the potential returns versus how much you lose from missing out on one potential customer, it starts to make more sense to add a click shield to your marketing budget.
In fact, many of our customers find that ClickCease pays for itself in the amount of fraudulent clicks blocked.
If you’re concerned about fraudulent traffic on your PPC ads, you can trial our click fraud shield software for free to see for yourself.
