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What’s your opinion on click fraud?
On Google in particular. I had always assumed the majority of click fraud is removed from search traffic by the ads platform itself – but I’ve never tested any 3rd party tools to filter out bots clicks. Am I missing a trick?
Do you use any click fraud software?
Is it worth the cost in saved ad spend?
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1 Reply
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we spend 7 figures on ads every year and over 5% of it is click fraud
this is on google ads
google automatically refunds less than 0.1% of our clicks, and keeps the other 4.9% for themselves
they won’t answer our emails about the problem
we’re using 2 tools, tried a few and most are garbage
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We use ClickCease and have seen big improvements in lead quality with our enterprise-level clients. Some industries suffer from click fraud more than others.
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we stopped using bing ads as most of the traffic was click fraud
would love to stop using google but no alternative
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I think its wonderful and would like to get involved in it.
How do I get some of that money?
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Click fraud softwares only work when you believe in it.
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Google and Bing both will have very loose definitions of what they consider fraud. For example, if you get a bunch of leads and all the emails are:
Fraud123
Fraud124
Fraud125To us, that is fraud: real people don’t sign up over and over with emails and only change the last number. The platforms will not view this as fraud.
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So what are these tools doing actually. Tells you which click is from bot. Or do they also block bot clicks and you dont pay for that click?
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Do I think there is robotic traffic that clicks on ads? I don’t think it, I know it. There is robotic traffic clicking on your ads. It tends to be more prevalent in display environments, but it can happen with Google search as well.
I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the same folks claiming to filter the bots are sending the bots.
>On Google in particular. I had always assumed the majority of click fraud is removed from search traffic by the ads platform itself.
Google is going to have more insight into the traffic than any of these bot tools.
>Do you use any click fraud software?
No. Waste of money for most things. If you work in a very high CPC vertical like personal injury law you might get some value out of finding out competitor IPs and blocking those clicks.
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Click fraud in PPC is the boogeyman.
Companies that “protect” against click fraud are taking advantage of paranoid business owners that truly believe their competitors are spam clicking their ads to waste their money and they’ve even convinced some digital marketers as is evident by the constant questions about it.
Does it happen? Sure.
Does it happen enough where it’s not covered by Google to care about? Nope.
Are companies that will attempt to measure that “gap” for you reliable? Also nope. Snake oil.
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It depends on the industry, like if your running local campaigns for law firms and restoration companies it’s astronomical, Google says almost 40% of our clicks are click fraud, if Google admits it’s that high the real number is staggering.
That’s really the only situation where services like clickcease make sense, local high competition environments
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I’ve used Clickcease, the jury is out on if these tools are real or snake oil.
It detects fraud and gives you “proof” that you can then send to google for a refund.
Tried it, google responded and said they have their own click fraud prevention and didn’t refund anything
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GDN click fraud is a disaster. Search, click fraud is less of an issue, but we’ve seen an uptick in the last year. Device level targeting and exclusions – OS/connection type/etc can take care of a lot. Bulk location exclusions as well.
If you’re running GDN well, you have to do a lot
Edit: by fraud, I don’t mean competitor clicks, obviously. That’s not happening unless you’re in the top 1% most competitive nationwide verticals. Crawlers and bots are clicking, however, and getting away with it
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Anyone have any thoughts on Lunio (aka PPC protect) to share?
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> I had always assumed the majority of click fraud is removed
No it is not. Not sure about other countries but in Poland industries like:
– towing (don’t know exact name for this)
– taxi
and less likely:
– house building/renovation
– car rentalBut the first two… well… i just don’t take those industries because too much work. You can block them without using expensive software but You need to export logs/ip adresses and ban some of them (and/or exclude areas)
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Here’s my take in this article I wrote about a year ago: https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/do-you-need-third-party-click-fraud-protection/
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