How to recognize clicking and protect yourself from it
Ad clicking has become one of the main problems of advertising campaigns. According to Imperva statistics, organic and direct traffic to 27.7% consists of bots, and Lunio predicts that in 2024 16.59 billion dollars will come from invalid clicks. Read more about how to recognize click fraud and how to fight it. click.ru will tell you in this article.
What is clicking
Click-fraud is a type of fraud in which data on advertising traffic is deliberately distorted.
Typically, contextual advertising is paid per click, where each link click should ideally bring one potential buyer. However, attackers, independently or using special software, systematically click on ads and go to the advertiser’s website to no avail. This burns the budget and spoils the real statistics of the advertising campaign.
There are several types of clicking, each of which has its own mechanism and goals:
Manual clicking. Fraudsters independently click on the link, thereby emptying the advertising budget of entrepreneurs. This is usually done by competitors or specialists hired by them. As a rule, such click fraud slightly distorts reporting and does not waste much of the advertising budget;
Automatic clicking. A more dangerous dangerous format that uses bots, scrapers and other special software. Some programs can operate almost unnoticed, completely imitating human behavior. But even the simplest bots that only click on links can cause serious financial damage to a company;
Passive clicking. Usually not related to competition – webmasters are more likely to get involved here. They place advertising links in pop-up banners that open when leaving the site and force a person to accidentally click on it. Links disguised as part of the content are also often used.
In addition, the user may be in a hurry to click on an advertisement when it appears first in the search results after typing a query.
As a result, click fraud can be provoked not only by competitors and webmasters, but by ordinary users or simply dissatisfied customers.
How to recognize clicking
Contextual advertising can fail for various reasons: unclear ads, poorly selected keywords, unprofitable offer. To make sure that your campaign’s losses are related to click fraud, pay attention to the following signs.
Rapid budget burnout. Here you need to be guided by logic and your own experience. For example, if one click costs 150 rubles, and the budget is only 2000 rubles, then the funds will run out very quickly. But when you have already launched a similar advertising campaign several times, in which the budget was enough for several days, and this time it was used up in half an hour – most likely, the matter is click fraud and you need to carefully study the statistics.
High percentage of failures and quick exit from the site. This information is available in Yandex Direct and Google Analytics. If the bounce rate is over 90% and users are on the site for no more than 15 seconds, a bot is likely clicking on the link.
Duplicate geo of users. Statistics on the location of site visitors will help here. If the report shows that the majority of clicks are from one city and, at the same time, they are associated with frequent refusals and a low level of views, this may be an intentional click-through.
Traffic comes from a specific device. For example, when all transitions come from several identical sources and are accompanied by a high failure rate.
Regions visited. If an advertising campaign is aimed at St. Petersburg, but the reporting includes cities that are very remote from this area, there is a possibility that this is a click-through.
Same users. During click fraud, statistics show many identical visitors who do not scroll the site, do not perform any actions on it, and quickly leave it.
High rate of invalid clicks. It can be viewed through the tab of the same name in Google Ads. The system independently recognizes fake transitions and returns money to the advertiser for them. Yandex Metrica also tracks data on invalid clicks.
In addition, clicking can be determined by identical behavior of different users, lack of scrolling, and visitors without cookies.
How to deal with clicking
You can eliminate some of the risks and reduce the damage from click fraud yourself. To do this you need:
Analyze the data carefully. Monitor for extremely high CTRs, sharp declines in conversion rates, systematic conversions from one source, or frequent bounces. This will give a general understanding of the situation and options for adjusting the advertising strategy.
Monitor server logs. Analyzing site server logs will help identify and block sources of anomalous activity, such as identical HTTP request headers or transitions from IP addresses that are not typical for the region.
Use stop lists and black lists. For example, to block users who have made more than 3 unsuccessful transitions to the site.
Adjust your requests. Requests that account for the majority of rejected visits can be temporarily disabled or made lower frequency by adding specifics to the keywords.
Limit your advertising budget. This way you can immediately stop impressions when funds run out. Firstly, this will help to avoid unnecessary expenses in the presence of click fraud. Secondly, it will allow us to draw analogies with similar advertising campaigns that previously worked without interruption.
Send a complaint to Yandex. To do this, you need to specify the campaign number and the time for which it needs to be monitored. At the same time, you must attach all evidence of bot activity: screenshots, suspicious ClientIDs, links to Yandex reporting, or abnormal conversions in the web viewer.
Fighting on your own will not solve all problems with clicking, but it will make the work of scammers and competitors much more difficult. To further protect your budget, you can also use services with an anti-fraud function.
For example, in our сlick.ru have your own free tool for automatic monitoring and anti-click protection. It is developed on the basis of AI, independently detects transitions from bots and blocks impressions for them. At the same time, you don’t need to configure anything – the module is completely automatic.
The list of bots that are known to the service is constantly updated, so the tool protects advertising campaigns even from the newest robots. The service also allows you to view detailed reports on click fraud. General statistics indicate:
bot transitions through advertising. The amount of fraud detected in advertising campaigns is calculated;
total number of bot transitions. Fraud is detected from all traffic on the web resource;
saved budget. It is calculated based on bot clicks from advertising multiplied by the average CPC over the last 30 days.
You can also see statistics about identified bots within a specific advertising campaign:
IP address and source;
time of last activity;
the device from which the transition was made (phone, desktop, tablet);
OS type (Windows, Android, iOS);
probability in percentage that the transition was made by a bot;
country and city;
page viewing depth;
number of visits, refusals and other metrics.
In order for the service to recognize advertising traffic from search results, advertising campaigns must be marked with the provided UTM tags.
To activate the antifraud module you need to install a code click.ru on the website. This is the only thing that is required from users – after this the module will work automatically.
Conclusion
Clicking is one of the main problems with contextual advertising in Yandex and Google. Long-term exposure to click fraud can not only hit the budget of advertising campaigns, but also distort statistics, worsening the analysis and planning of a marketing strategy.
You can deal with clicking yourself. For example, analyze advertising campaign reporting, monitor site logs, or send complaints to search engines. But to more effectively eliminate click fraud, it is better to use special services that automatically recognize and block bots, and also display detailed statistics on fake visits to the site.
