You may see that you have a lot of clicks on your campaign, but you are not getting the conversions you expected.
Of course, this circumstance can be due to several reasons, but the best thing to do is to first make sure that fraudulent clicks are not the cause.
What are fraudulent clicks?
They are defined as "the action performed by a person or automated system, bots, which aims to make clicks on your ads in order to consume and kill the daily budget of your Google Ads campaign".
What are the patterns that can indicate fraudulent clicks?
If you are a small business, you will quickly notice that your daily budget is evaporating too quickly.
If your investment is significant, it may be more complicated to notice.
In both cases, if you have a history in Google Ads, you can get to see if there is something wrong through comparisons between periods.
There are other details that can also give you clues, for example:
- Suddenly the profitability of your campaigns starts to drop.
- Unexpectedly the cost of acquisition, CPL... increases without a logical reason.
- Suddenly the bounce rate starts to rise considerably.
- And without knowing how the number of pages visited by people who came to your website because of the Google Ads ad decreases.
How can you fight with fraudulent clicks on Google Ads?
1. Monitor invalid clicks
Log into your Google Ads account, and select the metrics you want to be displayed.
2. Exclude IPs that perform fraudulent clicks.
Google Ads cannot show you the IPs originating from fraudulent clicks, however, the platform has a section to exclude the IPs that you deem convenient.
Go to the section "Campaign Settings - More Settings - Exclude IPs".
Now that you know how to exclude IPs that practice fraudulent clicks,
How can you get the IPs?
Remember that neither Google Analytics nor Google Ads can provide you with information on the IPs, so you are going to go a little "blind", and you have to try by trial and error to guess which IPs are burning your budget.
If your web is very localized and has little traffic it will not be difficult to locate them, but if it has a lot of traffic it will not be so difficult.
A simple way to collect the IPs is through the Cpanel of the Hosting where you have hosted your website.
And if you still can't get anything?
Should you give up?
No. In the market there are different programs that can help to alleviate the problem. Let's see some examples:
ClickCease
For $15 per month, its Basic version records up to 1,000 fraudulent clicks, and offers a 14-day free trial that monitors 24/7 and sends notifications of fraudulent clicks to your email, in addition to other features.
StopClics
A bit more expensive, 29€ per month, is StopClics. It logs fraudulent traffic, blocks IPs immediately, refunds invalid clicks and offers other features.
To conclude, I think it is important for you to be very aware that fraudulent clicks cannot be 100% controlled. This type of foul play usually simulates behaviors very similar to those of a regular customer, so they are difficult to detect. What is clear is that you will be able to control a percentage of fraudulent clicks, but hardly all of them.
Thanks, one more week, for reading me! And if you have any doubts, suggestions or questions regarding this topic, leave me a comment and I will be happy to answer them.
Best regards,
AL
