Detect & Stop Click Fraud – Tips for Small Business & New Bloggers

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Click Fraud could prove to be very expensive for the new bloggers. Small Business who work on limited advertising budget could lose a lot of money due to click frauds.

In layman’s language, click fraud occurs when people who are not interested in your product or services, click on your ads and run you out of your money.

Big advertising companies like Google, spend a lot of money in veryfying any click frauds. They do it through intelligent systems as well as having real people look into suspicious ad-clicks.

For a small business organization & new bloggers who has a small advertising budget,  Statcounter provides an easy way to detect & report unusual clicks on their advertisements. By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages you could see the IP addresses, location & frequency of visits of the clickers.

Competitors often click ads to run their competition out of the advertising budget. Every time they click on your Google ad, for example, you pay them a small amount from your ad money. So the more they click, the faster your ad budget runs out.

Since your competitors were clicking on your ads with the intent of consuming your advertising money only, none of those clicks result in any sale or leads. The advertiser simply spend their money on false visitors.

Many times, website publishers who are showing your ads, often click on the ads on their own websites to earn money. Since website owners earn money when anyone who clicks ads on their website, such fraud publishers earn money at your cost, while you do not get a true visitor.

There are few simple ways that a website hit counter could help publishers detect click fraud:

• Multiple entries from the same IP – the site counter tracks IPs. If you see the same IP repeatedly coming to your website in short spans of time, it could mean a click fraud
• Same Redirecting URL – hit counters show the URL which a visitor has clicked to come to your website. If any of these URLs are the advertising URL & show up repeatedly on your hit counter, you could suspect a click fraud
• High Hits from Specific countries – StatCounter analyzed click fraud reports. It suggests that many  third party Click Fraud operations are located in countries such as India, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania and Russia. If you see repeated access from any of these countries, it could be due to click frauds

Although you cannot stop click fraud completely, if you suspect click frauds, you could take the following steps to control click fraud:

1. report the activities to the advertising agencies – Google for example, suspends the accounts of all fraudulent webmasters
2. report click fraud to DMCA - reporting the fraudulent website owners to the hosting DMCA office often results in the suspension of the websites. However, government of many countries like India, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania and Russia are never able to enforce copyright laws in these regions
3. elminate certain countries from seeing your ads – with Google & good ad agencies you can choose where to show your ad & where not to. Geo specific advertising would lower your chances of leads & sales but could save you from losing money on click frauds