20% of ad clicks on average are frauds

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Click Skanner – how does it work and why should every company advertising on the Internet invest in it?

TrafficWatchdog team

22.04.2024 r.

clicksknner, Trafficwatchdog, click fraud, PPC,

Click Skanner – how does it work and why should every company advertising on the Internet invest in it?

source: own elaboration

What are invalid clicks?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab) provides the following definition of invalid clicks:

"Invalid Clicks arising from suspected “click fraud” are a sub-component of Invalid Clicks and originate from a user, program or automated agent (e.g., Internet robot or spider) that accesses a URL for the purpose of manipulating click measurement activity or click-based advertising payments, having no intention of legitimately browsing site content, making a purchase or performing any other type of legitimate conversion action. Suspected click fraud can arise from both human-initiated and application-initiated automated activity; also, suspected click fraud can arise from invalid Ad Impression activity. Click Fraud also includes situations where a user is unwillingly, or tricked into, accessing information(for example, user “virus” infected activity, or auto-clicking functions)."

So invalid click is a click on an advertisement that isn’t based on the user's actual interest in the product or service that the advertisement concerns , and thus gives very little chance of conversion (usually a sale). Most often, a bot or other program, unfair competition or former employees are responsible for clicking paid ads, and the purpose of such action is to deceive the advertiser: increase his marketing costs, deplete his daily advertising budget (then his ad will no longer be displayed that day) or extort him to pay for unfairly generated traffic. However, it is worth remembering that an incorrect click is also one made accidentally by a user who had no bad intentions towards the advertiser but simply made a mistake.

What is Click Scanner?

Click scanner is an innovative tool that uses advanced technological solutions to check every paid click obtained by the advertiser. The system breaks down the click into prime factors and analyzes it taking into account many criteria and use virtual finger-print technology to detect any irregularity which may indicate that the click is incorrect.

What benefits does an advertiser using the Click scanner gain?

First of all, control over what clicks it pays for and significant savings in marketing costs. As we mentioned above, we check every click from paid channels for the advertiser - our users have full access to these analyzes and a number of other statistics in our panel which can help assess the quality of sources generating paid clicks. Additionally, we can block incorrect clicks from specific channels (most Google Ads, Facebook Ads) in real time, so the advertiser won't pay for them at all and his daily budget won't be exhausted. At the client's request, we also prepare reports about click quality generated by other channels and send them on their behalf to specific marketing service providers.

Does the problem of invalid clicks also affect my company?

The problem of incorrect clicks affects basically every company that pays for advertising in the PPC (Pay Per Click) model , which is used, among others, in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, affiliate campaigns, programmatic platforms or in cooperation with price comparison websites.

As you can read in the article „Powstanie kodeks na rzecz czystej reklamy i informacji. "Oszustwa reklamowe potężnym biznesem"”("A codex for clean advertising and information will be created. "Ad fraud is a powerful business"" published on the website wirtualnemedia.pl, experts from ABTShield estimate that "on the Polish market, false impressions of advertisements account for as much as 52 percent all traffic, and 43 percent clicks on ads are fake. 16 percent of all generated leads are the "work" of bots." The scale of the phenomenon is huge and applies to basically all companies that use the Internet to promote their products and services.

Among our clients, invalid clicks constitute from a dozen to even 60 percent of all paid clicks. There are factors that can signal that your ads are being clicked - such as your daily budgets being quickly exhausted, your conversion rate being lower than usual, the average time a user spends on your site being lower than usual, or significant amounts of traffic coming from suspicious geographic locations. However, if the paid clicks you received were incorrect from the beginning, you probably won't notice a difference in your statistics.

To check how much of your marketing budget we can save, we offer a 2-week free test during which we assess the quality of paid clicks obtained by a given advertiser.

Does your marketing agency monitor the clicks you pay for as an advertiser using its services?

Unfortunately, many marketing agencies (although some of them contact us about cooperation in their client's campaigns) don't have technology that provides protection against ad frauds and don't analyze every click obtained for the client. Please remember that it is the advertiser, not the agency he works with, who bears the costs of such false clicks, so it is simply not in the agency's interest.

Does Google block your invalid clicks in real time?

Google analyzes the clicks it acquires and detects some of the invalid traffic - most often, invalid clicks resulting from the operation of bots and programs. However, it often ignores invalid clicks created by real users. Only in the case of certain invalid clicks that it detects, Google is able to filter them out before they appear in your account and you are charged for them. In the case of fraudulent clicks that weren't detected automatically but identified later, Google will most likely issue a refund to the customer's account. This causes two problems for advertisers - firstly, not every company can afford to freeze part of their marketing budgets, secondly, daily budgets are still exhausted, which means that the ad was no longer displayed on a given day, and Google doesn't compensate the cost of a lost customer in any way.

Our Click Scanner system has been verified and accepted by Google, so we can detect and block invalid clicks obtained by our clients on most Google Ads (and Facebook Ads) campaigns in real time. This means that no fee will be charged for such fraudulent traffic, and daily budgets won't be artificially clicked. We encourage you to test our solution for free for 2 weeks. During this time, we will check whether Google actually catches all invalid clicks related to your campaigns and estimate how much your company can save by using the Click Scanner.

If everything works fine, why change anything?

We often hear the argument that a given company "is satisfied with its current marketing solutions and doesn't want to change anything", so let's specify that Click Skanner doesn't in any way interfere with the marketing solutions used by a given company, but allows to increase their effectiveness by saving advertising budgets and providing more accurate statistics on individual paid traffic sources. Thanks to this, advertising expenses are better utilized and marketing strategies focus on the most effective channels.

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