Click fraud is an unfortunate reality of the internet. You can also prevent it with a few simple tweaks to your advertising setup. By using click fraud data to identify patterns and trends, you’ll be able to catch offenders more easily before they happen. Here are some tips for preventing click fraud:
Analyse your data
One of the most important things you can do to prevent click fraud is to analyse your data. Look at it, evaluate it and then decide how best to use that information to improve your business.
Compare impressions to clicks.
The best way to determine if bots are clicking on your ads is to compare the number of impressions you receive with clicks. If there are more impressions than clicks, real people will likely view your ads. This means that any time spent optimising your campaign is time well spent! It also means that less money will have been wasted on clicks from bots and other fraudulent sources.
If there are far more clicks than impressions (or vice versa), this could indicate that click fraud has occurred in your ad campaigns and on websites where you display those ads. To determine whether or not this is the case, look at how many ads were clicked during each hour of the day over a period of days. Are most of them occurring during peak hours? If so, you may want to look at how many impressions were received during those hours. It could be a coincidence, but it could also mean something entirely.
Use attribution windows to see patterns.
Attribution windows are the periods in which clicks are attributed to an ad. For example, if you set the attribution window for your ad at seven days, then all clicks on this ad within seven days will be counted as conversions. The click on your ad won’t be counted as a conversion if the user does not convert during this period.
You can adjust these settings to see if there are any patterns or spikes in your traffic that could indicate fraudulent activity. You might find that specific referral sources keep sending fraudulent traffic by setting the attribution window for 12 hours instead of 24 hours and monitoring whether there is a pattern with those referrals.
Limit the number of ads
If you are running a campaign targeting a specific audience, use the same ad for a limited time. If you are running an unlimited campaign, run the same ad for a limited number of impressions or clicks.
Sometimes serving the same creative over and over can confuse users and make them less likely to click on your ads.
To reduce click fraud, avoid cookie deletion detection, which may lead to accidental clicks being recorded as fraudulent.
Create blocking lists for repeat offenders
The next step is to create a blocklist of suspicious IP addresses. A blocklist is a list of IP addresses you have determined to be fraudulent or malicious, and you should use it to block repeat offenders. A whitelist is the opposite of a blocklist: it’s a list of known good IP addresses, and you’ll want to use your whitelist when there’s an issue with an unknown IP address.
Whitelisting is vital for keeping your website secure from click fraud because it allows only specific IP addresses access to certain pages on your site. This prevents hackers from accessing any part of your website through unknown means.