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Getting lots of (apparently) bot clicks
Hi guys,
I’m just starting out in the PPC world. I’m running a couple of display Google Ads campaigns, targeting the US exclusively.
After analyzing last week’s traffic in Google Analytics I’ve noticed a lot of paid clicks coming from very small and remote towns. They all originated from Linux Operating System. So I’m suspecting it’s definitely bot traffic – costing me hundreds of dollars.
Any advice on what I can do – if anything? I’ve already excluded these cities in Google Ads
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6 Replies
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there are services that track and blacklist known bot IPs.
IMO it is worth the cost because I’ve been affected by this in the past and Google customer service is no help unless you can provide detailed logs.
Clixtell is one I’ve tried – not sure if its the best. Maybe others can add their 2 cents.
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Create audience of users who was less than 5 sec on your site or did not take any action if you have micro-conversions set. Then exclude it from campaigns
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Be sure that you remove all mobile app traffic, and be sure that your targeting expansion slider is all the way off (to the left).
Edit: Clarified mobile APP
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As others have said, try creating an audience of users under 5 seconds on the site and excluding that. It sounds like a super simple type of bot click fraud/attack to mitigate so no point paying for software to combat it (although there are options out there).
If that doesn’t help, look in to something like [PPC Protect](https://ppcprotect.com) (disclaimer: I’m a founder here. Happy to answer any questions! Other options are of course available), but if it’s something super simple you can likely mitigate it without the added cost. If you do start looking in to software solutions, just make sure you don’t end up with something that is just using third party IP blacklists/sampling or simple rulesets – they’re outdated within minutes and aren’t going to have any benefit to you (although they’ll throw lots of fancy numbers at you to make it look good).
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You could try ClickCease. I use it on search and it works well, but I haven’t tried it on display. Honestly, I’ve found that Google’s programmatic placements are garbage. You can’t keep up with the negative placements- the sites are so spammy Google should be ashamed of themselves. I stick with managed placements + audience and demographic targeting.
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Can’t you block ‘Linux Operating System’ if google can see this. I’m not sure why small towns are a clue to it being bot traffic. The operating system looks suspicious to me though.
I have been running ads a while now but not Google for a while since it’s been months trying to get Merchant Centre to not ban us. It seems like a brick wall. Seriously Google you are losing a lot of revenue.
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