General Written by 0

A common issue with your google ads is it is being clicked again and again, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes accidentally. These clicks are nothing but invalid clicks or click fraud. Click fraud is a common problem faced by many of the users who do PPC marketing.

Let’s say, someone (your competitor, enemy, or anyone random) has set a bot to keep on clicking your ad to waste your budget or has hired a person to do this task manually. This is a malicious act and this will waste the budget that you have allocated for your campaign.

Another scenario is when a person accidentally clicks the ad for a second time after clicking it once, this is not a malicious act but you do need to pay for the click. There might be a case where frequent clicking is intentionally done to increase the profit of the website that is hosting your ads. These are the different examples of how click fraud happens.

How to Check the Invalid Clicks in Your Campaign?

It is very important for you to see how many invalid clicks you have got and what is the ratio of it to the total clicks to have a better idea of how your campaign is going. For this, you have to add invalid clicks column in your Google ad campaign and there you will see the total number of invalid clicks marked by Google.

There are four important columns which you need to be aware of:

Invalid Clicks: As said, you will see the total number of invalid clicks in this column, you won’t be charged for all these clicks.

Invalid Click Rate: The formula for calculating this is: (Invalid Clicks / Total Clicks ) x 100%. It is a good metric to see the percentage of invalid clicks you are getting in your campaign.

Invalid Interactions: All the interactions coming from the invalid clicks will be counted and the total number will be shown in this column.

Invalid Interaction Rate: The formula for calculating this is: (Invalid interactions / Total interactions) x 100%.

What Things Do You Need to Take Care of to Prevent This?

The foremost action you can take is to monitor your traffic, check from where the traffic is coming, what are the different sources? Do you find any suspected clicks? Check-in detail so you will have an idea about your leads. This will give you an idea if your campaign is getting you good results or is it misused by someone.

Make sure you or your team is not clicking your own ads. This will force Google to flag your IP address and also your money will get wasted. Nobody does that but if any fresher has joined your team, make sure you let him/her know about this.

Get rid of the low-grade backlinks. It is vital to have backlinks of good quality but when you have backlinks from websites with low domain rating, it won’t do any good to you. Your page rank won’t improve and it will bring you low-grade traffic. Bots might be included in the low-grade traffic which can result in invalid clicks.

What Google does to protect you from Invalid Clicks?

Google has developed a system where invalid clicks are found out and automatically flagged. Clicks are monitored based on several parameters, some of them being IP address, the time between multiple interactions, etc. The invalid clicks are removed and are not shown to you in your report. If you want to see them, you can add the suggested columns shown above and you will get to know the details.

If you see an invalid click in your report, no need to worry as sometimes,  a few clicks are diagnosed later on in the second analysis by Google. It may happen that a few clicks are flagged valid in the first analysis but they will be flagged as invalid by Google eventually in the second analysis and you won’t be charged for it. If the cost is deducted for that click, it will be returned eventually.

How a Click Fraud Software will Protect you Against this?

A Click Fraud software will provide you an upper hand for your campaign and will detect the manual/automatic malicious clicks in the most efficient way. There are various jobs that a click fraud tool does: it gathers the data for the clicks – IP address, source, location, time, device information etc, analyzes it, and checks if the click should be deemed invalid or not.

Most of the click fraud protection software in the market today have an amazing feature of blocking fraudulent users from seeing any of your ads in the future after identifying them once. They come with advanced reporting and dashboard features that provide a detailed view of the campaign performance. Businesses feel more confident about their campaign using such tools. They can use their funds mindfully for growing their business rather than wasting it on malicious invalid clicks.

So, what are you waiting for?

Select the right software for your business by comparing the features of the top ones in the market and you can definitely get rid of the unwanted invalid clicks on your google ads. Don’t forget to check out their pros and cons and pricing plans to select the right one as per your budget.

Click fraud can waste your budget totally so one needs to be careful about it. Follow the measures discussed above and stop invalid clicks on your ads today to get the best out of your campaign!

Comments are closed.