Updated: July 17, 2013
We all know it happens – competitors click our Google or Overture Ads; Affiliates of the PPC vendors click our ads to earn a percentage; and the search engines pocket the revenue. Though both Google and Overture assure us that they have measures to filter fraudulent activity, I am certain that they have no problem if some of this activity gets through – after all, it’s profitable. Here is one approach to handling the problems associated with ClickFraud.
There may be multi-million dollar companies who arent crying about it, but theyre sure pissed off about it. And to some of them it might just be another bunch of spread sheets and budgets. But to the smaller advertisers, this is their livelihood. They cant afford to bleed 10,000 dollars a month!
Key to the success of spotting click fraud is the ability to track unique URL’s
You need to have access to log and/or visitor data. It’s about looking at your log files using a log analytics application. Or you need to be looking at your traffic from a third party traffic analysis application [e.g. web analytics vendor]. Or from a third party campaign management/traffic analysis tool.
it’s essential to hard code an ID for the PPC engine, as well as the keyword ID into the URLs of your landing pages.
Google breaks out search clicks, but they dont break out content clicks. As soon as I became aware of that, I went to our own reporting system and saw that the clicks were all around this one term and that they had come from somewhere in Googles network.