How Prevalent is Click Fraud and How Effective Are the Preventative Measures?

Click fraud is a fraudulent technique where bots and/or human clickers are used to drain the entire pay-per-click (PPC) marketing budget of one or more companies, without providing them with any quality lead/sales in the process. These efforts have the potential to not just drain available funds from a PPC campaign, but click fraud also makes the entire PPC campaign a completely fruitless expense for small companies as a result.

How Prevalent is Click Fraud in 2020?

To highlight the seriousness and tremendous, negative economic impact of click fraud in 2020, we will focus on three key factors from research data gathered by the University of Baltimore:

1. Online businesses, aka eCommerce as a whole is estimated to lose roughly $3.8 billion to click fraud by the end of 2020
2. If we were to include every business and marketing campaign being defrauded, the estimated loss is predicted to be around $23.7 billion in 2020
3. Fraudulent clicks stand at approximately 10% across all PPC campaigns

These facts should be sufficient in establishing the severe nature of click frauds in 2020 and beyond.

Mitigating Click Fraud: Is It Possible?

Most online business owners are of the opinion that click fraud cannot be prevented, and unfortunately, even some of the experts were of the same opinion in the beginning. However, thanks to rapid advances made in cybersecurity and antifraud solutions, preventing click fraud is most certainly a possibility today.

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To know more about click fraud and the most effective steps you can take to mitigate it, ClickGUARD has made all information about click fraud publicly available on their website. They don’t just offer a comprehensive guide to understanding the nature and history of the danger, but also provide the most successful solutions against click fraud.

What Can You Do to Prevent Click Fraud from Draining Your PPC Budget?

In order to prevent any type of fraud, we need to first gather as much information about it as possible. While we have provided a decent introduction, it is a rather brief one. Nevertheless, the link above should provide readers with enough info to close their knowledge gaps. That should, in turn, allow them to take informed steps towards mitigating click fraud with the necessary software solutions and general security measures.

Although only professionals and the tools devised by them can truly decrease or even eliminate chances of the campaign losing big money to click fraud, there are some general guidelines that might help as well. Take note of the following and it would be a good place to start at least:

• Use Facebook ads for your PPC campaign as they do have a robust security system in place to prevent click frauds
• Add known fraudulent IP Exclusions from your Google Ads settings
• The exclusions will help Google Ads detect clickers with similar IP addresses, to whom the ads will not be shown

With the help of proxy servers or VPNs, it isn’t that difficult nowadays for human clickers and bots to overcome these small barriers. In truth, these are only primary and basic measures, so if you have a PPC campaign in mind that has high potential, you need dedicated software solutions to prevent click fraud and make the campaign reach valid, target customers.

Bekki Barnes

With 5 years’ experience in marketing, Bekki has knowledge in both B2B and B2C marketing. Bekki has worked with a wide range of brands, including local and national organisations.