As pay per click (PPC) advertising gains popularity, more and more of our customers are raising concerns about click fraud, which is still a pretty fuzzy area. So what is it? PPC adverts are those 'sponsored links' that you see at the top and down the right hand side of the Google search page. Every time a web browser clicks on one of those links, the advertiser pays a small fee to Google. So on the one hand you don't have to rely on the organic search engine rankings, but on the other hand you are paying the search engine to help people to find your website.
With the correctly configured advert you can direct the 'searcher' straight to the page you wish them to land on and see. But what if someone starts clicking on your advert 20 times a minute? Even if you're only paying 10p per clickthrough it's still costing you £120 per hour! Even worse there are automated scripts available which can imitate legitimate web browsers clicking on ads - it may be against the law but as most things internet it is very difficult to track down the culprit.
In February Google announced that they are now making it possible to block certain competitor IP addresses from receiving ads in the hope that this will stop rivals from clicking on ads over and over again. Click Forensics, which provides click fraud services and operates a Click Fraud Index survey of advertisers and agencies, pegs the click fraud rate for the top tier search engines at just under 12 percent.
If you are concerned about this issue then there are a number of programs such as clicktracks and clickdefense that can be used to review and compare sessions, conversion rates, costs, IP addresses etc. in order to detect possible click fraudsters. PPC advertising is a major revenue source for the big search engines so they do take click fraud very seriously. Google and Overture will automatically detect some instances of click fraud and will not charge for these. If you do suspect that you are paying more than you should be on PPC advertising due to click fraud then the best thing you can do is to alert the search engines of the problem and let them do your dirty work.
In my opinion it would be wrong to be deterred from PPC advertising because of click fraud fears - with a well-thought-out campaign, the benefits of this type of advertising far outweigh the potential drawbacks.
