Protect your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign from click fraud

With the competition for keywords increasing daily, keywords in internet advertising are becoming very expensive. Click bots can rack up quite a hefty bill for online advertisers and this can destroy smaller online companies. Recently a company made a click fraud tracking site that checks if a clicker has flash plugins or JavaScript enabled. If these two features that most browsers have are not enabled, then the clicker is most likely a clickbot. People who used this tool noticed that up to 30% of click was from “browsers” without flash or JavaScript enabled. Since many Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts are written in JavaScript, a click on one from a browser without JavaScript enabled would be a clear indication of a click bot. Not surprisingly, Google has reportedly banned the click fraud detection product in the adwords system. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, argues that click fraud should be seen as a “cost of doing business” and the “perfect economic solution” is to “let it happen”. At Stanford University in March 2006, Schmidt discussed how Google’s PPC advertising is “self correcting”. Basically this means that advertisers will eventually pay less for keywords when they realise too many fraudulent clicks are being made. This analysis suggests that advertisers need to factor in the cost of click fraud into their ROI calculations. Schmidt does however state that Google engineers do try to get ahead of click fraud because it can cause problems before the advertiser sees it. You can try out this click fraud tracking site for yourself. Remember that it is in BETA. If you have any questions or queries about this article, please leave a comment here or you can post in our search engine forum.