Prevention is currently the best way to mitigate the risk of click fraud. Advertisers continue to pile millions into the online advertising industry to create an unprecedented wave of ads. However, click fraud keeps growing at the rate of an average percent every year.
Due to the complexity of the online advertising ecosystem and lack of transparency towards click fraud. This has created a growth incentive for fraudsters to hijack the fast-growing $316 billion global digital advertising budget.
However, combining the right information and due diligence can mitigate risk and safeguard long-term profitability. Although there is no hard and fast way to identify click fraud, yet, there are ways to put stop to click fraud.
If You Are Going To Invest or You Already, In The Digital Advertising Industry, Then Click Fraud is Your Concern.
With a whacking great investment in the digital advertisement, do you know that the level of Click fraud is expected to reach the addition of $30 billion in the coming 24 months?
To every investment in Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, over 8.3 percent of this investment is exposed to click fraud and financial loss. Yes, financial loss.
Click fraud occurs due to the large, and sudden increase in money spent on click ads. Click fraud costs ad networks billions – advertisers were estimated to lose $19 billion due to click fraud in 2018 alone. With fraudsters coming up with more sophisticated ways, it simply has become an overwhelming task for many business owners.
Can Click Fraud Be A Problem To Your Business?
Click fraudsters operate on the internet underground and actions can be very hard to track. Sophisticated technology is used, taken with the advantage of the unintegrated internet infrastructure, and the distance in digital ad space between buyer and seller.
The digital advertising industry estimated digital fraud overall to range between $6.5 billion and $19 billion. The large range suggests one thing only: no business owner should experience how big of a problem click fraud is.
Click fraudster’s aim to open up budget caps and costs of performance ads of any business. As they generate excessive revenue by clicking on ads, which brings no profit, rather decreases the financial value of any business.
These Clicks, Where are They Coming From?
Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs as a threat to the online advertising industry. But, however, these clicks are not just by itself, where are they coming from?
Competitors: competitors are the most obvious perpetrator. A competitor intentionally clicks on ads or promotions to drive the marketing costs up for a rival. Before you know it, the competitor has blown up the activity cost of an ad while generating little to no income for the associated business
Website Owners: due to the opportunity given to website owners to place an ad on their website for exchange of money, some website owners have dedicated their time to click on their own website ads and therefore make their own site more attractive for more ad placement.
Customers: Customers can accidentally add to click fraud. Some regularly click through on paid search ads to regularly access a site, rather than using the search or a bookmark.
However, either they use the Automated method or manual method. Automated click fraud uses software to repeatedly click on ads. Manual click fraud is done by actual people, either from a rival or outside to physically click-through ads.
Preventing Click Fraud
Click fraud is a pressing concern and if left unattended, can result in a total financial disaster. With several signs such as a sudden spike rate of spending, daily budget hitting quickly, and conversion rate skyrocketing, however, this is to tell that click fraud is playing already.
To completely eliminate click fraud, below, therefore, are tools to stop predatory Click Fraud practices.
Proxy Detection
Pinpointing the true location of a user is a critical element in fighting click fraud. The modern proxy does much more than forwarding web requests, all in the name of data security and network performance. Companies use them for security and network performance purposes, individuals use them for privacy concerns and some other cool functionalities.
Most click fraud occurs on compromised IP addresses that are proxies, sometimes VPNs. These fraudsters hide their IP addresses through Proxies, or VPN connections to conceal their location and true identity.
However, Proxy Detection is most comprehensively used to identify IP address connections with a high probability of malicious intent. Likewise, undesirable connections that are highly inclined to engage in fraudulent activity. Proxy Detection prevents fraudsters with anonymized or spoofed IP addresses from accessing important pages and stops them from creating the headaches of advertising click fraud.
Geo-Targeting
Today, it is very important to physically locate customers and visitors in order to do effective marketing geo-targeting, comply with localized legislations, eliminate business fraud, or maximize profit per visit.
Knowing the location of your customers, preventing click fraud is as good as placing your ad being in the right place at the right time.
In internet marketing, geotargeting is the method that focuses on the personalization of online content based on the geographical location of potential buyers.
However, targeting is simply defining who your ad pops to and market being measurable, sufficiently large, and reachable.
This technique allows you to offer content of interest to the users, according to the place where they reside. You can also exclude your ads from displaying in various geographic regions by country, region, city, or postal code. The technology is not infallible, as a buyer could make a purchase while traveling outside the country. However, geolocation-based tools are a helpful data node in the fraud scoring process.
Device Fingerprinting
Device fingerprinting is helpful for targeting and inherently benefits advertisers and marketers. The uniqueness of the fingerprint shows several requests– albeit through a proxy or even using a fake IP address.
Device fingerprinting works by uniquely identifying computers, tablets, and mobile phones based on various attributes-browser version, screen dimensions, list of installed fonts, etc.
This gives you the ability to block devices associated with bad actors. For example, If a fraudster commits clicks activity using a particular fingerprinted mobile phone, it would be difficult for that fraudster to commit another transaction from the same device.
To Round-Up,
Tracking a variety of detailed metrics will help better target your users. This will enable you to better identify fraud warning signs. Target your ads effectively to ensure they appear only on quality, trustworthy sites, and try to exclude certain locales within reason. Lower-quality sites tend to attract more fraud.
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