As a PPC advertiser, results mean everything. If, from a experimental test, you find that something is not working as efficiently as it should do in your PPC campaign, you will obviously change it. For this reason, a PPC campaign is always seen as a work-in-progress in a bid to constantly improve it for better results.

However, the one area that seems to be neglected when it comes to improving (or, in this case, reducing) is click fraud. It is something that I can be 100% sure will affect every single pay per click campaign out there – to what extent is another question. Therefore, it makes sense for an advertiser to want to remove as much click fraud as possible from their campaign, so more of their budget actually goes towards the contextual traffic they bid for. Here are a few ways you can help to protect your campaign against click fraud.

#1 Don’t Bid For Top Ad Space

The highest level of click fraud occurs at the adverts that rank number one on paid search results. The main reason for this is because those the majority of invalid clicks occur towards the adverts that gets the most impressions: statistically speaking, this generally is always going to be the top advert of paid search results.

Therefore, if you find that your campaign has got a healthy CTR and a low conversion rate, try competing using a lower CPC so that you do not always get top spot: not only will this reduce the click fraud your campaign gets, it will also make your campaign get more traffic for your budget allowance.

#2 Exclude IP Addresses

If you can find out the specific IP addresses of those that generate the highest level of click fraud, there is an option inside Google AdWords to exclude your chosen IP addresses from ever seeing your adverts again. Just like with the above point, from doing this will allow more of your budget to go towards more contextual traffic.

#3 Change Your Targeting

At the end of the day, if you are getting high levels of click fraud associated to your account, it is because the keywords you are using to target potential consumers is allowing those with high levels of click fraud to view your advert and perform the click fraud. Therefore, it might be a wise idea to rethink your targeting strategy to see if you can target the same market but from a different angle. With this in mind, if you not have done so already, niche and negative keywords will be good additions to bringing more contextual traffic with lower rates of click fraud.

Ultimately, Google does quite a lot already to protect their advertisers from click fraud. However, as good as this may be, campaigns are still affected by it. Therefore, by implementing the above techniques, you can help to reduce the chances of your campaigns from losing budget away to invalid clicks, helping to make your campaign run that bit more efficiently.