Best Click Fraud Software Tools for Protection & Detection

What is Click Fraud? 

Click fraud is specifically a black-hat technique of false inflation in the number of clicks on a PPC ad. Google marks them as ‘invalid clicks’ that occur when a paid ad is clicked on repeatedly to drain all the budget from the advertisers.  

Click frauds are driven by two primary reasons:

1. Advertisers try to eliminate competitors by draining their ad budgets and driving up their cost per click (CPC) as well as end their budget capital before the end of their campaign. 
2. Ad publishers click on the ads displayed on their own websites for a greater amount of revenue generation for their site.

Types of Click Fraud:

There are three main types of click fraud that you need to be careful of: 

1. Manual clicks to increase your ad budget 

Manual clicks are usually done by competitors wanting to drain your ad budget and increase your ad costs. Suppose you are ranking higher than your competitors in search results, then it is quite natural that they will not like to see this and so will click on your ads to drive up your costs, draining your ad budget. They can eventually drive up to such higher costs that you are unable to afford further advertising for those keywords.

These manual clicks are basically performed by discontent business owners who aren’t performing as well as their competitors and therefore click on the competitor’s ads to reduce the competition. According to investigated reports way back in 2013, agencies were named ‘click farms’, and today the practice is commonplace for such ‘farms’ to be acting out full-time click fraud activities. These agencies have one aim of clicking on their clients’ competitor campaigns and draining advertising budgets to drive them out of the market competition. 

2. Manual clicks by webmasters 

When your PPC campaigns run on the GDN (Google Display Network), then you have chances of experiencing click frauds. Whenever you run an ad on your PPC campaign hosted by a third-party website and your ads are clicked, they earn a cut. Third-party websites hosting Google AdWords (now Google Ads) are part of the Google AdSense. 

Even if none of your competitors are taking advantage of your PPC campaigns, chances are high that webmasters will be advantageous to your situation. Every webmaster is allowed to display Google ads on their site. They create an AdSense account and then they start to display ads instantly and any person clicking on the ads gets as much as 68% of the amount paid to Google. As a keyword costs a good amount of money, a webmaster can make a lot of money even if he clicks on a very few of them on a weekly basis. 

Suppose, a webmaster runs many ads on their website and perhaps has had an ad spend of $100, and the AdSense partner would be profiting around $68 out of the ad revenue. 

3. Automated fraud clicks through the software 

The latest addition to this is that hackers have developed sophisticated click fraud systems using fake IP addresses as well as web sessions. These are called ‘Bot Farms’. 

• Bot networks

Studies suggest that about half of the internet traffic is bot traffic, that is, non-human. Click bots are made for PPC click frauds. Bots are one of the popular forms of click fraud operation and are automated click farms. Large networks of computers are infected with a sort of malware, but the owners of these networks or computers are completely unaware of the present malware in their devices. These malware results in the silent operation of visiting different websites and clicking on particular ads without any human help. In this, the clicks appear unrelated to each other as they are done by individual IP addresses. 

• Click Farms

Click farms form a large part of the click fraud operation system and it is more likely that your competitors hire these click farms in order to remove your PPC ads from the search engine results thereby eliminating you from the competition. Click farms are one of the most aggressive forms of click fraud operation where click farms are utilized and employees are paid in lieu of clicking on ads all day through. These click farm agencies are usually found in the third world or developing countries with a large population and facing unemployment problems so they get hired for really low wages. The people involved are trained to click on ads in a natural way so they cannot be detected. Click farms are used by internet publishers for increasing their incomes and also by competitor businesses who hire click farms to click on their competitor ads and drain out their ad budget thereby snatching all your clients. 

Are Search engines doing anything about it?

Search engines have been criticized for several years down the line and not striving much hard for identifying and eliminating click fraud. Be it a malicious click or not, it generates cash flow to the search engine that displays it. Hence, in order to enhance their reputation, the search engines have designated their own task forces to fight against click fraud. 

Google has been a slight winner by far for its robust anti-click fraud agenda. Google’s program of click fraud detection has a three-step procedure beginning with automated filters.

They also have advanced algorithms that help to pick out and filter the invalid or fraud clicks in real-time and so the advertisers are saved from the charges of the clicks. But this filtering system is not much reliable to detect all types of click frauds; so, Google’s Team for Ad Traffic Quality Centre has started conducting offline and manual analysis for the removal of clicks that seem invalid or fake even the advertisers are charged to pay per click.

Apart from these, Google has also introduced processes of investigating clicks that are found suspicious depending on the reports of the advertisers. All the malicious clicks are detected and categorized as invalid and thereby credits are processed to the advertiser’s accounts. The center enables tracking of every single click for ads displayed on Google and whenever it detects any sort of suspicious behavior, Google automatically refunds the cost per click back to the advertisers.

Your ads are continuously monitored by Google’s team regarding click fraud and whenever it gets detected, you get automated refunds. This makes businessmen happy and helps Google get a better reputation among advertisers and shows that Google only allows high-quality traffic. 

The automated detection system fails to catch all the fraud clicks which in turn means that click fraud still exists. Fraudsters put much of their time and effort into the click fraud campaigns hence it becomes tough to identify each and every fraud click.

The fraudsters use automated programs to bring more advancement to click fraud. Some software of click frauds is so advanced that they can easily fake user clicks and thereby avoid detection. The users are still charged for fraud clicks even after the detection process is done. 

Advertisers are investing a lot of money in investigating their PPC traffic, to check if they are genuine or fake. When they find out spam clicks on their ads that are not detected by Google, they report these fake clicks to Google and Google will check through analysis to verify its invalidity.

If it is evident being a fraud click, the amount charged for that specific click would be refunded to the advertiser’s account. This suggests that Google might fail incomplete detection of click frauds but if you provide evidence for your fraud clicks, Google would give back your charged money.