Click Fraud in your Google Adwords Account

Plano, United States, 12/09/2012 / SubmitMyPR /

Integrityweb is now monitoring click fraud from competitor clicks. Most Search Engines, including Google Adwords, confirm the existence of click fraud and are working hard to solve it. Researchers estimate $3.6 billion were lost to click fraud as of 2012. Google claims that on average less than 2% of all clicks through Google’s systems are click frauds whereas some of click fraud management companies report click fraud rates as high as 30%.. So click fraud poses a serious threat to PPC advertisers as well as to the credibility of PPC networks.

How Click Fraud Occurs
Most people have had some sort of encounter at some points with internet scams, viruses, spyware or other security problems. A pay per click account makes an attractive target to a technically savvy hackers and scam artists criminal and gaining access to someone’s account allows them to promote their schemes at someone else’s expense.

Click fraud occurs when you place a keyword in a category for PPC advertising and a competitor keeps clicking on that link with the intention of costing the advertiser too much money. This could be very costly to the advertiser. At 4-40 dollars a click, a competitor clicking on a adword campaign can cost a company hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

Google Adword Fraud Detection
Google or Yahoo try to put fraud prevention technologies into place to prevent click fraud by all parties; however, google adword fraud is difficult to detect which clicks are legitimate and which ones are fraudulent. Click fraud management companies like http://www.integrityweb.com build click fraud detection and prevention software and reporting systems that help track possible invalid clicks and reimburse advertisers for the invalid clicks. Most search engines boast that they protect their clients from this type of fraud by monitoring for duplicate clicks from the same ip address in a short period of time. Search engines claim that it is in their benefit to protect clients from this type of fraud. Many are doing some monitoring but there are many loop holes to search engine monitoring. Remember that is the way search engines are making money on clicks so it is in the search engines best interest not to block click fraud.

Some tips for safeguarding campaigns:
Monitor adword accounts regularly; particularly at the end of the week and take random peeks on the weekends. It only takes a minute to log on and check. Report fraudulant clicks to Google or Yahoo immediately if fraudulant
or competitor clicks have occured.

1. To help keep google adword fraud to a mininum keep an eye on click through rates. It is easy to review click-through rates and conversions with Google. Print out a daily or weekly report to monitor any bizarre activity. Reconcile click-through rates with actual web

2. Set a daily click limit. Monitor how many clicks are being generated over a period of time, so a advertisement isn’t just ‘left out in the open’ for anyone to click on. When the click limit has been reached, a ad will simply disappear.

3. Maintain a daily budget. Limit advertising costs on Adwords by setting up a budget. A budget should be at a reasonable level allowing it to maintain it for several months. If a advertisement is a target of click fraud, a companies losses will only be limited by its specified budget.

4. Use the geographic location feature. Using the geographic location feature is one of the best methods for safeguarding pay-per-click campaigns against click fraud activities. Do some research to find out where the best target market is, and focus on showing ads only in those countries or regions.

There are only a few adword management companies that offer blocking competitor clicks. When having a adword management company monitor and assist in a adword campaign, be sure that the adword management company will block adwords fraud or competitor clicks. One company that offers click fraud protection is Integrityweb at http://www.integrityweb.com