There’s had been research that shows that up to 20% of all clicks from PPC campaigns are in fact accidental or known as ‘click fraud’. These clicks are clicks that have the lowest conversion rate because they are mistaken clicks. As well as this, they may also be clicks 
which publishers have purposely clicked to make them more money for their Adsense campaign. We are lucky enough that Google AdWords is extremely strict with click fraud and with the added bonus of the Google Publisher Tool bar add on in Google Chrome, it is almost impossible for publishers to click on their own adverts (that is if they use Google Chrome as their web browser). It may have reduced from 20% nowadays. However, click fraud is still an on-going problem advertisers will face. The thing is that you can reduce click fraud yourself with a few simple tips.
The majority of click fraud occurs with the highest advert on the webpage. This is because:
- The highest advert is usually the most expensive advert. Therefore, this advert being clicked will make the publisher the most amount of money.
- It is the advert that is loaded first on a webpage. If it is being viewed for longer by visitors, there is a higher chance the advert will be clicked by mistaken.
- The highest advert will also have the highest chance of being close to another link (let’s say the blog post title or another link on the website). Therefore, the visitor may have wanted to click on the link nearby to the advert but actually my accident clicked the highest advert instead.
This makes clear that if you want to reduce click fraud as much as possible in your PPC campaign, try to make sure your advert is not the highest advert being displayed. You can do this through bidding less for your keywords. The highest adverts being displayed are usually the adverts that have outbid all other advertisers for that certain keyword because the highest advert in a webpage is usually the most desired position and placement for advertisers. With the use of researching and estimating the range of bids your keyword gets through the Google Keyword Tool, you can make sure your highest bid for that keyword won’t ultimately be the highest bid overall. This will make sure a few advertisers will outbid you gaining the ad position which gets the highest percentage of click fraud. As well as this, you can also:
Eliminate High Click Fraud Websites
There will be many websites out there that have higher a click fraud rate on their adverts than others. From the use of talking to others and analysing your campaign’s stats, make sure you eliminate and prevent your adverts from being displayed on these sites. You will want your adverts to primarily be displayed on websites with high conversion rates that are safe.
Choose Low Click Fraud Keywords
Although you won’t think it, there are certain keywords which do have higher click fraud percentages than others. There is no way you can determine which keywords these are without analysing your landing page’s success. Through the use of running multiple campaigns with different keywords aiming at the same market, you can determine which keywords (like an experiment) have the highest click fraud rate as well as identifying the keywords with the best conversion. You can then eliminate these high click fraud keywords to eliminate click fraud from your PPC campaign.
