Paid advertising is one of the most effective ways to boost your business online quickly. However, it can easily become expensive – especially if you do not have experts in charge of your ads. Whether it is Google, Bing or even Social Media ads, wasted budget can easily rack up significant costs that you might not have accounted for. One of the most significant potential costs on ad spend that you might not have considered is Click Fraud. Gumpo – as experts in every form of paid ads – are able to help you avoid wasting money and effort on your paid ads, through implementing click fraud prevention.
What is Click Fraud?
Click Fraud is when either a person or a programme clicks on an ad without any genuine desire to visit the site or landing page. Click Fraud can take place in multiple ways. The most common, and most likely to affect you, is malicious click fraud – a form of financial attack. In this form, your link or ad is clicked on simply so that you are charged for the click. Many paid ads work on a pay-per-click basis. This means that the more people appear to be clicking, the more you are going to have to pay.
Other forms of Click Fraud include attempts to manipulate search engine rankings. Unscrupulous users can take advantage of Click Fraud to artificially boost their search engine rankings by boosting their click through rate. This can contribute to pages becoming higher ranked than they deserve – which can affect your hard run rankings.
How do click bots work?
Most click fraud is carried out by bots, rather than bored competitors. This means that they can be far more effective at clicking links and ads many hundreds of times. Even simple click fraud bots are programmed to look convincing, taking realistic human actions such as clicking elsewhere, moving the cursor and more. This is intended to convincingly disguise the bot as if it were a real user. Google and other sites that host paid ads do attempt to deal with click fraud themselves. This is of variable success. Sites understand that many thousands of clicks coming from one source are not likely to be genuine. However, click bots can be set up to be active from many sources at once – helping to get around this issue.
Does Click Fraud really cost me?
Click Fraud costs businesses all over the world many millions of dollars every year. In fact, it was estimated that in 2018, bots cost businesses more than $19 dollars. In 2022, as much as 20% of all PPC budgets might be wasted on click fraud. This is especially true of competitive auctions, where a fake click could end up costing you £20 or more.
How can we help businesses deal with click fraud?
Click Fraud can represent a major potential waste of money for users of paid ads. However, you are not helpless against its danger. Gumpo are experts in how paid ads work, and preventing the worst excesses of the various dirty tactics rivals or fraudsters might use against you. We have access to advanced click fraud prevention tools and tactics that can help save you money and effort.
We have applied click fraud prevention to many of our existing high Cost-Per-Click PPC accounts, with significant and fast acting results. In one month alone, we saved an account around £1,571 in wasted ad-spend – coming from around 200 fake clicks. This made the account’s PPC traffic more than 75% cleaner.
We charge 2.5% of ad spend for Click Fraud Prevention services. This should reduce average ad spend by around 20%, meaning you save a significant amount overall.
