Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks – 7 Tips to Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks

How would you feel if you get home and receive a bill for the amount of $50,000 for Adwords? You will be surprised of course because you were planning on spending around $500 for your pay-per-click advertising. How would you feel if you were shut down out of nowhere after you thought you had a nice click through rate? Reason? The system shuts you down for fraudulent pay-per-clicks.

The system felt that you are engaging in fraudulent pay-per-click activity to increase your business’s profit.

Fraudulent pay-per-clicks are normally seen in online advertising. Fraudulent pay-per-click is a technique engineered to deceive entrepreneurs and it costs a lot of money. In most cases, fraudulent pay-per-clicks involve malicious, massive clicking of your pay-per-click advertising by no other than your competitor. This is done in their attempt to make you panic when you see your astronomical advertising bill and stop running pay-per-click advertisements.

We cannot eliminate fraudulent pay-per-clicks completely the best that we can do is watch out and avoid being victims of this. We as entrepreneurs have the ability to lessen the likelihood of falling for this because for sure it will devastate our advertising budget.

If you do not want to be one of numerous victims of fraudulent pay-per-clicks then you need to read on and follow some easy steps or strategies to dramatically reduce the risk.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 1: Set various bid costs for content-targeted websites

You can lessen your financial risk from fraudulent pay-per-clicks by putting a limit to the amount you are ready to spend per click. It would also help if you try to limit your exposure by limiting your placement of advertisements on “just any” website relevant to your keywords.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 2: Keep a close eye on your competitors

Like what I have mentioned earlier, your competitors are most likely responsible for any fraudulent pay-per-clicks that might happen since they have a lot to gain from it. It would be to your advantage if you monitor who is competing with your keywords in the search engines, as they could be a potential source of fraudulent pay-per-clicks.

If you want to get a free click tracking report then you can go to ClickForensics. The tracking report gives you the details you need like how many clicks are coming from competitors and other common sources of fraud.

If you are not ready to shell out money for this then you can check out companies such as AdWatcher and ClickDefense for free trials.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 3: Keep track of your advertising campaigns

Of all the tips that will help you avoid fraudulent pay-per-clicks, this is very simple. All you have to do is regularly check, review and measure your advertising campaigns to establish what is working and was it not.

In addition, Google and Yahoo give which you can access easily, not to mention Google can email you reports on regular intervals.

Now, your reports are there for a reason, do not disregard them. What you do with your reports is that you review it and try to identify any abnormal increase in your daily costs and focus on the keywords or campaigns that caused them. If you feel that the sudden increase is suspicious then by all means stop the campaign and research the root cause of it.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 4: Try to limit your pay-per-click advertisements to specified countries

You should know that some regions or countries have a much higher occurrence of fraudulent pay-per-clicks compared to others. What these countries have in common is that they have very low labor costs, and there are some companies out there paying them to just sit and click on those advertisements all day long.

Try to limit your advertising campaigns to the countries where you actually sell products and services.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 5: Make sure that you know where your advertisements are displayed

We all know that it is difficult to determine which website is responsible for fraudulent pay-per-clicks and for sure, Google and Yahoo will not provide such information. However, with Clicktracks you should be able to do that. This is very easy to use and it will provide you with search reports that you need to identify the content-targeted websites sending visitors to your website.

Once you have the information that you need you can easily exclude these websites you do not want to advertise on. Google will give you simple means of excluding them from your campaigns.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 6: Aim for high-value websites

If you use Google then you have the ability to set up campaigns to run on specific websites. All of these advertising campaigns are based on price per 1,000 impressions. You simply bid on the price you are prepared to pay for the advertisements to be shown.

Avoid Fraudulent Pay-per-clicks Tip# 7: Buy software programs that will provide you with special referral reports

As what I have mentioned earlier, ClickTracks offers search reports that will help you spot any content-targeted websites that are sending doubtful amounts of visitors to your website. ClickTracks can also assist you in preparing a report on fraudulent pay-per-clicks if there is ever a need to prove your case to a search engine firm.