Accidental clicks - what they are and how not to waste your marketing budgets on them
source: own elaboration
We often deal with the topic of advertising fraud and invalid traffic, but we rarely devote our time to the issue of accidental clicks. Below we will try to change that and describe this problem, because although it shouldn’t be thrown into the same bag as advertising frauds, everyone who deals with internet marketing should know how often invalid clicks are in fact random and what to do in order not to waste a advertising budgets on them.
Definition
Unintentional click is any click on an advertising link resulting from a random event or error. Their basic feature is that although there was no fraud (because it was not a deliberate action), the user is not really interested in the offer of the advertiser whose link has been activated. Unfortunately, the result of clicks made by accident is a loss to the advertiser who will likely have to pay for them, although the chances of generating sales are very slim. It’s also obvious that accidental clicks distort your campaign data statistics.
Not just clicks...
It is also worth remembering that the accidental activity described above not necessarily must be a click, it may also be application downloaded by mistake, or the advertiser’s marketing materials may be displayed inadvertently.
What can cause accidental clicks?
Although, in principle, such manifestations of user activity are random, there are certain parameters that may affect them, magnifying the phenomenon. Frequent accidental clicks may occur, for example, if certain parameters of the advertisement or the website on which it is displayed are incorrectly set. Google came to the conclusion a few years ago that accidental clicks appear often when the user tries to scroll through the content on the page or go to another subpage, which is why it has updated standards relating to ads published using its tools. It consists in the fact that the user could be redirected to the advertiser’s website only if he clicked in the middle of the marketing message, not in its edges. Thanks to this, we limit the number of random clicks, because in order to click in the middle of the advertisement, you must first notice it.
Another factor contributing to accidental clicks is the sudden appearance of an ad. By attacking the user this way, we run the risk of a large number of randomly generated clicks. The loading time of the ad is also important - if they load too slowly, they may appear when the Internet user is already focused on the content, and the act of clicking the ad may be accidental. In essence, most mistaken redirects to an advertiser’s website occur because a user wants to click on other content on the website and instead lands on an ad.
How can you spot accidental clicks?
One of the main statistics that can tell us that the landing page redirected accidentally is very little time spent on the page but in the same time natural user behavior. Some time ago, Facebook made a decision not to count, and thus not to charge advertisers for it, any clicks if the user returns to the original page within two seconds of being redirected. This factor is called by the social media giant „the abandonment rate”. According to research conducted by Facebook, people who click on ad and then leave the advertiser’s landing page after less than 2 seconds most often don’t act on purpose.
Following this path, it should also be mentioned that the time that elapses from the appearance of an advertising message to being clicked by an Internet user is also important. Nobody clicks an advertisement at the moment it appears. Google understands this and has therefore added a feature that allows you to click on an ad only if it has been visible on the user’s screen for a while.
Another sign that the click (or other activity) is the result of chance are significant anomalies - for example, a man „interested” in advertising products for women, a click from a location not supported by the advertiser or in which it has not been popular so far, etc.
The scale of the phenomenon
In July 2017, Pixalate checked clicks from programmatically displayed ads. It found that at least 12.61%, so more than one in ten, of all clicks generated from video ads served on smartphones using automation were random. On tablets, it was 5.7%, respectively, and the random click rate for video ad in smartphone apps was 3.7%. However, the fewest random clicks were identified in relation to display advertising on smartphones - it was less than 1% (0.88%).
Since we are talking about a random phenomenon, the statistics will not be very accurate - various studies give completely different values here, from the average of 10 to even 50% of all clicks.
How to protect yourself from them?
The fact that such invalid clicks are accidental doesn’t mean that we are completely helpless against them. If you are an advertiser, make sure you check parameters such as the time spent on the page after being redirected from the ad, or how long the ad was visible before it was clicked. Remember to specify in the terms of the campaign what exactly you will be billing for - thanks to this you can avoid paying for a large part of accidental traffic. Also, make sure that your ads are displayed in the right place and in the right way on your partners’ websites.
