As a digital marketing agency, you know first-hand the hard work and careful planning that goes into creating a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for your clients. After pouring time and resources into your clients’ Google Ads and other PPC campaigns, finding out that they have been sabotaged by PPC fraud or a click bot can be disheartening and even negatively impact your digital agency along with your clients. Understanding PPC fraud and how to combat it is essential for any digital agency owner. 

What Is PPC Fraud?

To understand PPC fraud, it’s important first to understand PPC itself. When making use of PPC advertising, the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked, essentially paying for targeted visits to their website, landing page or app. PPC advertising is entirely dependent on traffic. 

PPC fraud, or click fraud, is when an ad is illegally clicked with the intention of draining a company’s advertising budget with no potential for the click to result in a sale. Often, click fraud is done with an automated script, or click bot, that pretends to be a legitimate user clicking on paid search advertising with no intention of making a purchase. 

Why Are Click Bots So Prevalent? 

Click bots are used by different people for various reasons. Two of the reasons people use click bots can are to:

• Reduce competition: Sometimes, click fraud is used by a company’s competitors to drain their ad budget on clicks that have no chance of converting while negatively impacting their ad score with low-quality clicks. 
• Boost revenue artificially: To increase the amount of money an advertiser must pay, the owner of the website may employ a click bot to click the paid ad repeatedly.

How Can Click Bots Affect Digital Agencies? 

Click bots can wreak havoc on a PPC campaign. When your clients’ PPC campaigns receive enormous amounts of clicks and cost them money without any positive results, conversions or engagement at the end of the day, you will have unhappy clients on your hands. PPC campaigns with poor ROI for your clients could lead to them cancelling your digital agency’s services, losing you money and potentially damaging your agency’s reputation in the process. 

How You Can Protect Your Ad Budget From Click Bots

It is not possible to protect your PPC campaigns from bots with 100% accuracy, but it is possible to reduce exposure significantly with a few simple steps:

1. Google Ads IP Exclusions: Analyse your data to find IP addresses that are fraudulently clicking on your ads and exclude them from Google Ads.
2. Consider How Display Ads Are Run: Publishers are less likely to see your paid ads when you focus on retargeting display ads; this can help reduce click fraud. 
3. Focus On Ad Targeting: The more people who see your paid ads that are outside of your target audience, the more likely you are to attract click bots and fraudsters.
4. Take Social Media Into Consideration: Social media ads are less keyword-focused and more difficult to click fraudulently. 
5. Click Fraud Protection Software: If you think click fraud is making a serious dent in your budget, it’s worth investigating click fraud protection software.

Globital Australia is trusted as white label Google Ads resellers, SEO and website resellers and more. If you want to boost your client’s PPC campaign performance and keep their campaigns safe from click bots, get in touch with our team by emailing support@globitalmarketing.com.