How to Stop Fake Clicks is an issue that is faced by many advertisers who need to protect their advertising budget. Fake clicks are the source that can waste your advertising budget, distort statistics of your campaign, and hinder its analysis. No matter if you use Google Ads or Facebook Ads, it is essential to protect your campaigns from invalid traffic to get more effective results.
Click fraud is the situation when some people, bots, etc. Click on ads without any intention to buy the advertised goods or services. Of course, not all clicks that repeat several times are a fraud, but unusual traffic might indicate that.
To learn how to stop fake clicks effectively, one needs to analyze the campaign reports, find suspicious traffic sources, fine-tune audience targeting, and use reliable click fraud protection tools.
Here is some good news for you because there are some ways to detect suspicious traffic and save money.
What Are Phantom Clicks in Online Advertising?
Phantom clicks are ads clicks that do not belong to any actual potential customer. They can appear as a result of the work of automated bots, click farms, or actions of your competitors.
Typical warning signs are
- Sudden spike in clicks but no increase in conversions.
- Multiple clicks from IP addresses or traffic sources are considered suspicious.
- Anomalies in geographic traffic that does not correlate with your target market.
- High number of clicks but minimal engagement.
- Sudden spikes in advertising expenses.
- It should be noted that these factors by themselves are not proof of click fraud. Bad targeting, ineffective landing pages, and seasonality can also affect your conversion rates.
How to Stop Invalid Clicks in Google Ads
There are many tools offered by Google Ads that could help you detect traffic problems and minimize the risk of invalid clicks.
1. Check Invalid Clicks Behavior
The first thing you need to do is check your campaign reports in Google Ads. It can be done through analyzing changes in the number of clicks, their cost, conversion rates, and traffic sources.
There are many kinds of invalid clicks that are recognized and filtered out automatically. Some invalid clicks are credited back to advertisers.
Monitor your billing and campaign reports in order to see whether there is some suspicious activity that affects your ad spendings.
2. Adjust Campaign Targeting Settings
Invalid targeting may lead you to spending money on irrelevant traffic, even if clicks were valid.
Check your geographic targeting, audience, keywords, and placements. Exclude those geographic targetings or placements where the number of irrelevant visitors keeps growing, if there is data for that.
In search ads you can also use negative keywords for filtering out unwanted searches.
3. Check Conversions and Traffic Data
Don't measure the performance of your campaigns only by clicks. Analyze clicks along with conversion rates and other meaningful actions.
If there is a certain campaign that receives lots of clicks but no valuable results at all, check its search terms, landing page, target audience, and traffic sourcePreventing Fake Clicks in Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads, which use Meta Ads Manager for management, also offer features that allow identifying strange traffic behavior and enhancing its quality.
1. Examining Campaign Performance
Analyze your campaigns, ad sets, and separate ads in order to detect any irregularities in clicks, CPC, and conversion rates.
Do not react instantly to spikes in the metrics mentioned above; analyze your performance during several days. The unexpected growth of clicks should be investigated but does not mean that it is always about click fraud.
2. Enhancing Your Target Audience
Use proper audience settings in order to find more people who might be interested in your offer.
Analyze the geographic targeting, audience exclusion options, placement optimization, and your campaign objective. In case you are looking for lead generation or sales, focus on the conversion events instead of clicks.
Better targeting will not get rid of fake clicks but will save you from paying money on irrelevant clicks.
3. Checking Your Landing Page Quality
Sometimes the issue is not related to fraudulent traffic but to improper landing page setup.
Ensure that the landing page is fast, optimized for mobile phones, and relevant to your ad. You can
Can Tools for Protecting Against Click Fraud Help?
Where suspicious traffic keeps coming despite campaign optimization, use of a click-fraud prevention tool is probably a good choice.
Such tools like TrafficSaviour can aid in detecting suspicious behavior of Internet traffic.
- Depending on the tool and advertising platform, the following features might be useful:
- Detection of suspicious traffic.
- Monitoring IP addresses and visitors’ activities.
- Monitoring of bot and proxy traffic.
- Monitoring traffic sources.
Features of blocking or excluding traffic if such options are available within the particular tool.
Prior to selecting any tool, check whether it is compatible with your advertising platform and provides protection options that are really needed. Don’t rely only on marketing messages; check pricing and reports and read independent reviews on it.
No third-party tool can give you 100% protection from click-fraud attacks.
Best Practices for Reducing the Number of Fake Clicks
It is more useful to have a continuous monitoring process rather than to change campaigns randomly whenever something goes wrong.
Take these steps to reduce clicks:
- Evaluate campaign performance and bills.
- Study sudden click increases and suspicious traffic patterns.
- Apply proper targeting options.
- Measure the number of conversions and engagement.
- Keep your landing pages relevant, fast, and optimized for mobile devices.
- Reach out for support with any available invalid traffic reports.
- Consider using click-fraud protection software when it can pay off.
- Do not block users or IP addresses if you spot only one suspicious metric.
- There are shared networks, virtual private networks, and anonymous tools that legitimate visitors can use too.
Final Thoughts
The best way to stop getting fake clicks in Google and Facebook Ads campaigns is knowing your traffic. Monitoring, analyzing targeting, conversions, and investigating suspicious patterns are the right things to do before taking any actions.
Using a click-fraud prevention tool such as TrafficSaviour may become helpful in case of continuing suspicious activity, provided it has support and features.
Ultimately, the point is not to reduce the number of clicks. The main thing is to protect your budget and