Post by lizaseo11 on Nov 9, 2024 3:44:48 GMT
Fraud is unscrupulous clicks on advertisements with the aim of spending the advertiser's budget, which is not so easy to detect. Many news resources from the world of marketing and digital technologies warn about click fraud. Half of those who work closely with contextual advertising call it a disaster, while the other half does not pay any attention to it.
The fact is that click fraud exists, so your budget is at risk. It is not enough to just hear or glance at news headlines on this topic. An experienced marketer can and should independently identify signs of fraud or use special services for this.
Read this article to find out how to detect bad behavior from users who interact with your context. If you don’t do this, the entire chain of campaign optimization for end potential buyers will be disrupted: brand protection, visibility, and conversion.
Contents hide
1. Who is engaged in fraud?
2. Sure signs of click fraud
2.1. 1. Low KPI
2.2. 2. Bad behavior
2.3. 3. Datacenter IP addresses
2.4. 4. Abnormally high CTR
2.5. 5. Traffic sources
3. Why a marketer should analyze reports independently
4. How to protect yourself from click fraud
4.1. Methods of control
4.2. Click fraud and protection in Yandex.Direct
4.3. Google Click Protection
4.4. Botfaqtor Click Fraud Protection
Who is engaged in fraud?
There are four categories of users (and not only) who are engaged in clicking ads:
Bots . The bulk of invalid traffic. Smart teapots, PCs without antivirus, smartphones - any device infected with malware can be used for autoclicks and hit the advertiser's pocket.
Clickers . In other words, paid shopify website design motivated traffic. There are special exchanges for them that work openly. They are not prohibited by law.
Competitors . Cunning businessmen who compete with you for positions and can deliberately drain your budget.
Random users . This is not exactly fraud, such users cannot be called scammers. Such traffic is easily cut off by YAN and Google Ads. These are random clicks, when a user, for example, instead of the first position of the natural search results in the search engine, clicked on an advertisement, and then immediately left the site.
There are many methods of fraud, we wrote about them earlier .
Sure Signs of Click Fraud
Let's say you run your own advertising campaigns in one of the above networks. You manage ads, bids, analyze conversion and choose sites for placement. And now even a simple initial analysis shows that you have encountered click fraud. But is this really true? Here are the main signs of fraud:
1. Low KPI
The absence of KPI (be it conversion, sales or other end goals) is the surest sign that your ads are being clicked. If you place ads not only in Adwords or Yandex.Direct, but also in social media advertising networks - VK, Facebook (belongs to Meta, an organization banned in the Russian Federation) - try to compare the conversion on these sites. Provided, of course, that the placement factors between these resources are similar. See zero conversion compared to other channels? It's time to sound the alarm.
In other words, if there are 300 clicks on an ad on Facebook with a conversion rate of 30, and from Google there are 0 for the same three hundred, then there are scammers at work somewhere here.
Obviously, if 300 real interested users clicked on the ad, then at least 10 of them should have completed not only the first step - clicking on the ad - but also the second - filling out the form, making a purchase, calling.
2. Bad behavior
The first sign flows smoothly into the second: high bounce rate and short session duration. Again, we need to compare two identical indicators. If, when switching from one source, we see real user behavior - they fill out a contact form, spend some time on the page and interact with the content, increase the viewing depth - and from the second, pure zero, then sound the alarm again.
3. Data center IP addresses
In addition to the above factors, it is also worth analyzing the IP addresses of users who clicked on the ad. One of the signs of malicious fraud is the use of the IP address of the data center. This means that the pseudo-user is sitting somewhere on the host server, and not on a home or corporate PC. Contact the advertising platform's support service if you notice such activity. You will most likely be compensated for losses due to click fraud.
4. Abnormally high CTR
Another alarming sign of fraud that almost all advertisers face is an abnormal CTR. For example, if it is 1% or even 0.3% when placing an ad on a site, then it is worth analyzing such clicks in more detail. What to look for: if there is no KPI, there is a high bounce rate and a short session time - to hell with such a CTR and donor.
5. Traffic sources
In the reports on advertising campaigns, it is also worth paying attention to the mass of sites with low traffic, from which clicks come from advertising. It is advisable to audit the reports on the sites. If you see that empty traffic comes from such sites (refusals, no conversion), while real users come from traffic and popular sites, then it is worth expanding the blacklist.
But! Less popular sites are not equal to scammers. And they can have a good target conversion. That is, it is necessary to conduct a thorough and deep analysis of such donors.
Why a marketer should analyze reports independently
What if a marketer or business owner does not independently conduct an advertising campaign, but relies on their partners - agencies, which are also responsible for identifying and blocking fraudulent activities. This does not mean that a specialist can forget about click fraud. No. In such cases, it is very important to learn how to independently find signs of fraud and correctly evaluate the result obtained.
Let's say you notice something is wrong with your ad campaign. You report it to your service provider (if you work with an agency). After a while, they come back with a report and say there's no need to worry, you just have high ad visibility. Except in this case, it doesn't matter.
Visibility can be easily faked (simulated). Therefore, it does not exclude fraud in principle. It is not worth optimizing an advertising campaign in the direction of increasing the percentage of visibility, since this is more likely to increase the risk of fraud.
How to protect yourself from click fraud
Identifying fake traffic has become one of the main tasks of advertising platforms. Fraudsters are looking for new ways to click and create entire programs for this. Anti-bot systems of services repel attacks of bots, farms and unscrupulous competitors. There is a fight for the most important and valuable thing - the advertiser's budget.
Reality shows us that fraud must be fought. Otherwise, part of the budget will be wasted and flow into the pockets of fraudsters.
Any method can serve as protection against fraudulent click fraud: IP blocking on your own, network filtering funnel, special services such as Botfaqtor . The latter identify bot traffic, simplify the marketer's work and relieve him from fighting advertising fraud manually.
Remember that it is impossible to protect yourself completely from this. Cybercriminals are working ahead of the curve.
Methods of struggle
The confrontation between fraud and advertisers is a real digital war, and in war all means are good. To know how to combat click fraud, it is worth studying the methods offered by RS and anti-bot services:
To get rid of invalid traffic, IP blocking is used. Yandex has 25 IPs, Google has more - 500 IPs.
Targeting by demographics, location, devices and OS.
Temporary adjustment of indicators.
Remarketing.
If none of the methods helped and the scammers somehow managed to get onto the site through advertising, try contacting the RS support service. From experience, we can say that the amount of compensation will not be more than 10-15% of all suspicious traffic that you reported to support. It is impossible to completely remove such traffic, but it is possible to reduce it.
For more reliable protection, you can use the Botfaqtor service , where the accuracy of fraud detection is 98%. Botfaqtor uses Yandex.Direct segments and Google remarketing to protect your advertising campaigns on these sites. The system accumulates a base of 1.4 to 5 million bots that are denied access to your ads. Thus, ads are NOT shown to bots, and money is not written off for them. This is the most effective way to fight for your budget.
Click fraud and protection in Yandex.Direct
In its blog, Yandex explained in detail what click fraud is and how their anti-fraud system works. As you can see, Direct approaches the issue of the security of the placed advertising with full responsibility and seriousness. Multi-level protection technology is used to filter pseudo-clicks and fraud: manual and automatic filtering methods.
At the bot protection level, robotic traffic is filtered out. Not everyone can pass through online filters either — impressions and clicks are analyzed by 250 characteristics (events, seasonality, time). Not all fraudulent clicks on ads can reach offline verification. Here, user behavior on the page is comprehensively analyzed.
A whole monitoring department monitors honest behavior, and control services check every complaint about fraudulent traffic. With the help of this filtering funnel, pseudo-clicks and impressions are cut off automatically. Naturally, there may be errors, since cybercriminals approach their work with feeling, sense, and arrangement, and it is not always possible to determine for sure a sign of fraud.
If you order advertising placement in Yandex.Direct and notice a sharp jump in impressions or clicks, do not rush to write it all off to scammers. Make sure that it is not:
seasonal surge,
reduction of advertising impressions from competitors,
changed placement settings,
viral interest from offline,
VPN (foreign traffic) for overly secretive users.
If you have conducted an analysis and are sure that the clicks are being scammed, Yandex recommends contacting the support service with a complaint about the scammers. If you want to learn more about this, we have previously written about protection against fraud in Yandex, you can read about it here .
The fact is that click fraud exists, so your budget is at risk. It is not enough to just hear or glance at news headlines on this topic. An experienced marketer can and should independently identify signs of fraud or use special services for this.
Read this article to find out how to detect bad behavior from users who interact with your context. If you don’t do this, the entire chain of campaign optimization for end potential buyers will be disrupted: brand protection, visibility, and conversion.
Contents hide
1. Who is engaged in fraud?
2. Sure signs of click fraud
2.1. 1. Low KPI
2.2. 2. Bad behavior
2.3. 3. Datacenter IP addresses
2.4. 4. Abnormally high CTR
2.5. 5. Traffic sources
3. Why a marketer should analyze reports independently
4. How to protect yourself from click fraud
4.1. Methods of control
4.2. Click fraud and protection in Yandex.Direct
4.3. Google Click Protection
4.4. Botfaqtor Click Fraud Protection
Who is engaged in fraud?
There are four categories of users (and not only) who are engaged in clicking ads:
Bots . The bulk of invalid traffic. Smart teapots, PCs without antivirus, smartphones - any device infected with malware can be used for autoclicks and hit the advertiser's pocket.
Clickers . In other words, paid shopify website design motivated traffic. There are special exchanges for them that work openly. They are not prohibited by law.
Competitors . Cunning businessmen who compete with you for positions and can deliberately drain your budget.
Random users . This is not exactly fraud, such users cannot be called scammers. Such traffic is easily cut off by YAN and Google Ads. These are random clicks, when a user, for example, instead of the first position of the natural search results in the search engine, clicked on an advertisement, and then immediately left the site.
There are many methods of fraud, we wrote about them earlier .
Sure Signs of Click Fraud
Let's say you run your own advertising campaigns in one of the above networks. You manage ads, bids, analyze conversion and choose sites for placement. And now even a simple initial analysis shows that you have encountered click fraud. But is this really true? Here are the main signs of fraud:
1. Low KPI
The absence of KPI (be it conversion, sales or other end goals) is the surest sign that your ads are being clicked. If you place ads not only in Adwords or Yandex.Direct, but also in social media advertising networks - VK, Facebook (belongs to Meta, an organization banned in the Russian Federation) - try to compare the conversion on these sites. Provided, of course, that the placement factors between these resources are similar. See zero conversion compared to other channels? It's time to sound the alarm.
In other words, if there are 300 clicks on an ad on Facebook with a conversion rate of 30, and from Google there are 0 for the same three hundred, then there are scammers at work somewhere here.
Obviously, if 300 real interested users clicked on the ad, then at least 10 of them should have completed not only the first step - clicking on the ad - but also the second - filling out the form, making a purchase, calling.
2. Bad behavior
The first sign flows smoothly into the second: high bounce rate and short session duration. Again, we need to compare two identical indicators. If, when switching from one source, we see real user behavior - they fill out a contact form, spend some time on the page and interact with the content, increase the viewing depth - and from the second, pure zero, then sound the alarm again.
3. Data center IP addresses
In addition to the above factors, it is also worth analyzing the IP addresses of users who clicked on the ad. One of the signs of malicious fraud is the use of the IP address of the data center. This means that the pseudo-user is sitting somewhere on the host server, and not on a home or corporate PC. Contact the advertising platform's support service if you notice such activity. You will most likely be compensated for losses due to click fraud.
4. Abnormally high CTR
Another alarming sign of fraud that almost all advertisers face is an abnormal CTR. For example, if it is 1% or even 0.3% when placing an ad on a site, then it is worth analyzing such clicks in more detail. What to look for: if there is no KPI, there is a high bounce rate and a short session time - to hell with such a CTR and donor.
5. Traffic sources
In the reports on advertising campaigns, it is also worth paying attention to the mass of sites with low traffic, from which clicks come from advertising. It is advisable to audit the reports on the sites. If you see that empty traffic comes from such sites (refusals, no conversion), while real users come from traffic and popular sites, then it is worth expanding the blacklist.
But! Less popular sites are not equal to scammers. And they can have a good target conversion. That is, it is necessary to conduct a thorough and deep analysis of such donors.
Why a marketer should analyze reports independently
What if a marketer or business owner does not independently conduct an advertising campaign, but relies on their partners - agencies, which are also responsible for identifying and blocking fraudulent activities. This does not mean that a specialist can forget about click fraud. No. In such cases, it is very important to learn how to independently find signs of fraud and correctly evaluate the result obtained.
Let's say you notice something is wrong with your ad campaign. You report it to your service provider (if you work with an agency). After a while, they come back with a report and say there's no need to worry, you just have high ad visibility. Except in this case, it doesn't matter.
Visibility can be easily faked (simulated). Therefore, it does not exclude fraud in principle. It is not worth optimizing an advertising campaign in the direction of increasing the percentage of visibility, since this is more likely to increase the risk of fraud.
How to protect yourself from click fraud
Identifying fake traffic has become one of the main tasks of advertising platforms. Fraudsters are looking for new ways to click and create entire programs for this. Anti-bot systems of services repel attacks of bots, farms and unscrupulous competitors. There is a fight for the most important and valuable thing - the advertiser's budget.
Reality shows us that fraud must be fought. Otherwise, part of the budget will be wasted and flow into the pockets of fraudsters.
Any method can serve as protection against fraudulent click fraud: IP blocking on your own, network filtering funnel, special services such as Botfaqtor . The latter identify bot traffic, simplify the marketer's work and relieve him from fighting advertising fraud manually.
Remember that it is impossible to protect yourself completely from this. Cybercriminals are working ahead of the curve.
Methods of struggle
The confrontation between fraud and advertisers is a real digital war, and in war all means are good. To know how to combat click fraud, it is worth studying the methods offered by RS and anti-bot services:
To get rid of invalid traffic, IP blocking is used. Yandex has 25 IPs, Google has more - 500 IPs.
Targeting by demographics, location, devices and OS.
Temporary adjustment of indicators.
Remarketing.
If none of the methods helped and the scammers somehow managed to get onto the site through advertising, try contacting the RS support service. From experience, we can say that the amount of compensation will not be more than 10-15% of all suspicious traffic that you reported to support. It is impossible to completely remove such traffic, but it is possible to reduce it.
For more reliable protection, you can use the Botfaqtor service , where the accuracy of fraud detection is 98%. Botfaqtor uses Yandex.Direct segments and Google remarketing to protect your advertising campaigns on these sites. The system accumulates a base of 1.4 to 5 million bots that are denied access to your ads. Thus, ads are NOT shown to bots, and money is not written off for them. This is the most effective way to fight for your budget.
Click fraud and protection in Yandex.Direct
In its blog, Yandex explained in detail what click fraud is and how their anti-fraud system works. As you can see, Direct approaches the issue of the security of the placed advertising with full responsibility and seriousness. Multi-level protection technology is used to filter pseudo-clicks and fraud: manual and automatic filtering methods.
At the bot protection level, robotic traffic is filtered out. Not everyone can pass through online filters either — impressions and clicks are analyzed by 250 characteristics (events, seasonality, time). Not all fraudulent clicks on ads can reach offline verification. Here, user behavior on the page is comprehensively analyzed.
A whole monitoring department monitors honest behavior, and control services check every complaint about fraudulent traffic. With the help of this filtering funnel, pseudo-clicks and impressions are cut off automatically. Naturally, there may be errors, since cybercriminals approach their work with feeling, sense, and arrangement, and it is not always possible to determine for sure a sign of fraud.
If you order advertising placement in Yandex.Direct and notice a sharp jump in impressions or clicks, do not rush to write it all off to scammers. Make sure that it is not:
seasonal surge,
reduction of advertising impressions from competitors,
changed placement settings,
viral interest from offline,
VPN (foreign traffic) for overly secretive users.
If you have conducted an analysis and are sure that the clicks are being scammed, Yandex recommends contacting the support service with a complaint about the scammers. If you want to learn more about this, we have previously written about protection against fraud in Yandex, you can read about it here .