Pay per click (PPC) is one of the most popular forms of advertising in use on the internet enabling advertisers to promote their sites using keywords. However, PPC is also prone to click fraud, that is, clicks designed to earn money for the publisher, or, on rare cases, waste the advertising budgets of competitors.

There are a number of steps you can undertake to at least reduce, if not prevent, PPC fraud on your advertising campaigns.

1. Set realistic daily budgets. This at least prevents your entire budget being wasted in one PPC session.
2. Capture IP numbers of visitors to your sites: If you find the same IP address appearing repeatedly many times over hours and days and it comes from one of your paid ads, you are almost certainly the victim of click fraud.
3. Try to track the IP Address of your competitors. If they show up in your web logs regularly you may be a victim click fraud
4. Visits from an affiliate partner site generate a unique reference number. Record those numbers whenever possible and compare with your logs
5. Check where visits originate to see if any strange or unexplainable patterns appear. For example, the Far East, India in particular, is home to companies who market their services to fraudsters

If you find any strange behaviour, report it to your PPC provider. If you employ a reputable PPC advertising network such as Google or Yahoo!, they will track your ads for you and can be fairly effective in cutting out PPC fraud activities. Lesser known providers are more interested in your money than protecting you.

PPC is an effective form of advertising so long as you are on the ball and watching and monitoring how fast your budget is being used and by whom.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 7:12 am and is filed under PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.