How to detect and prevent spam clicks and click fraud?
If you’re a publisher, you’ve probably noticed the small yellow boxes in your ad reports that signify spam or abusive clicks. But what are they exactly, and what can you do?
More than two out of every ten desktop clicks are spam clicks. Spam clicks do not have to be a problem for publishers if they invest in the correct measures to avoid them and ensure long-term revenue. In this article, we’ll talk about everything you need to know about spam clicks on publisher ads. Continue reading to find out more!
Spam Clicks Explained
Spam clicks are the ever-increasing abusive clicks on your AdSense advertising from bots or click farms that cost publishers millions of dollars each year in AdSense bans and income clawbacks. They fall under the category of ‘click fraud.’
Spam clicks can be done accidentally or on purpose by competitors, causing Google to detect invalid click activity on your website’s ad units and prohibit your AdSense account. According to a Pixalate analysis, publishers lost an estimated $2.4 billion in the second quarter of 2016 owing to fake traffic. That is an enormous amount of cheese! So, what are our options?
If you’re still perplexed about spam clicks, consider a click farm worker or a competitor clicking on one of your ads 100 times. These scammers are not necessarily wasting their time continually clicking on your adverts because their main goal is to have their Google AdSense account suspended.
Google takes spam clicks and abusive click activity very seriously, and its powerful algorithms can readily detect spam clicks. This issue also arises when publishers repeatedly click on their own ads or request that their staff click on them. This will only result in the termination of your account.
Even if you accidentally click on your own adverts, these will be recorded as spam clicks. Many publishers have faced these issues with illegitimate traffic (IVT) producing abusive clicks on their ads and have failed to take appropriate action to permanently stop IVT.
Spam Click Types:
Manual Spam Clicks:
Because manual spam clicks require real people to click on adverts, the potential for growth is fairly limited. Manual click fraud is even more difficult to prove because it might be excused as unintentional clicks.
There are three sorts of manual spam clicks:
Spam Clicks by Competitors:
When competitors click your link, they know you’ll have to pay and receive nothing in return. Even one competitor hitting your link daily can break your budget for a tiny business. There are precautions in place to prevent this from happening. A rival with a network of friends or employees is a more plausible situation. Each network user accesses the same link at a different time or from a different device.
Affiliate Spam Clicks:
Placement services like Google AdSense match marketers with established sites based on shared interests and demographics. You provide the placement service with a banner ad or a text hyperlink, and the service displays it on a comparable host site or affiliate. The affiliate is compensated when a visitor clicks on your ad. The affiliate makes easy money, but the system can also be misused. Affiliates, for example, may occasionally click on adverts. Affiliates, like the competitor stated above, may have employees, friends, or family members click for them. The end consequence is the same: the affiliate earns more money at your cost.
Accidental Spam Clicks:
Not every click fraud is detrimental. You may be refreshing your site’s advertising by accident out of curiosity, or your friends or customers may be clicking on your ads to see what they’re about. It’s all good intentions, but it’s still costing you money. Furthermore, each useless click taints your customer marketing data.
Automated Spam Clicks:
While manual spam clicks are inconvenient, automated abusive clicks are extremely harmful. The majority of the time, these are affiliates bringing in traffic via bogus clicks. Among the automated spam clicks are:
Bot Traffic:
Bots conduct normal internet chores such as web surfing, producing abusive clicks, and so on. Cybercriminals can create “botnets” by secretly installing malware on thousands of innocent machines. In this manner, they have passive control over the machines that generate spam clicks.
Hit Inflation attack:
Affiliates may occasionally seek users for assistance; they are encouraged to click ad links to “support the channel” and help finance future content. They are doing the affiliate a favor by clicking on these adverts, but the advertisers are losing money in this situation. Hit inflation is a more aggressive strategy in which code snippets concealed in legitimate links redirect viewers to an ad page, followed by a content page. A click can be as little as a second spent on the ad page, and the “ad page” can be as small as a single pixel. Users are unaware that this is a hit exaggeration. These spam clicks overstate the number of visitors who arrive at an advertiser’s site via affiliate links.
Click Farms:
Click farms combine both human and automated spam clicks, in which a large number of low-wage workers click on links using several devices in order to increase click stats. The assembly-line method is used to automate the process, in which workers are stationed in a single area and have access to up to 50 to 100 devices (including smartphones and tablets). The clicks appear legitimate, but these workers are impersonating botnets behind the scenes.
Illegitimate clicks have an impact on both publications and advertisers.
Spam clicks have an influence on the entire advertising ecosystem and are equally significant to publishers operating AdSense cost-per-click campaigns. Abusive clicks eat away at your Adsense earnings as well. Because abusive clicks deplete the budgets of legitimate advertisers, the likelihood of brands continuing to pay for ad inventory on your site decreases. This also harms the publisher’s reputation.
When this occurs, the system will assign your ad space to the next advertiser who would have bid less against it. If we continued this procedure in the future, you would be displaying advertising at lower rates than you should be, which would eventually kill your gross ad revenue as well.
What happens now that suspicious clicks have been detected?
If your ads are being clicked at an unusually high rate without any solid conversions, Google should be notified immediately away.
As a result, you’ll be able to tell Google what you think is going on with your account and that you’re not sure where the spam clicks are coming from. This will prevent any future Adsense account bans, and with the right IVT solutions, you will be able to permanently halt abusive clicks on your adverts. Keep in mind that the majority of spam clicks on Google Adsense advertising are generated by people clicking on their own ads or attempting to trick the system. Inflating your Google AdSense earnings artificially will only harm your site’s monetization in the long term.
Why is it critical to eliminate spam clicks?
To avoid losing ad revenue, publishers must be cautious of spam clicks and click fraud. What you don’t realize is that the folks who benefit from click fraud are your competitors. Indeed, 11% of all paid search clicks are fake, and 36% of display ad clicks are similarly bogus.
If someone clicks on an ad but does not plan to buy anything, you will still get a commission – but if advertisers discover spam clicks on your ad inventory, they may be unhappy. They will stop buying your ad inventory once they discover that the majority of your site’s traffic is bot traffic or traffic from click farms. You should think about installing efficient invalid traffic solutions that can permanently eliminate click fraud and abusive clicks on your ad inventory. Measuring and preventing click farm or bot-driven spam clicks will not only strengthen your advertiser reputation but will also help protect you from costly DDoS assaults, cut your content delivery network expense, and reduce the chance of AdSense bans.
Detect and eliminate spam and abusive clicks for good.
The Traffic Cop dashboard allows you to delve further into the traffic quality on your site. As seen above, the Traffic Type part of our click fraud solution tool categorizes incoming traffic on your site into several categories, such as search engine crawlers, blacklisted IP addresses, and so on.
Avoid companions who are untrustworthy or of poor quality.
When you engage with low-quality ad networks, search engines, or directory sites, your website faces the danger of accumulating invalid visitors. If you intend to use AdSense arbitrage to buy site traffic, make sure that everything you do conforms with Google AdSense standards and that you monitor all sources of traffic on your site.
Bots are being blocked by using Robots.txt.
Robots.txt files are text files embedded on your web server that tell crawlers whether or not to access files. These bots will occasionally visit your website and consume a large amount of bandwidth, causing your website to slow down. This can lead to unstable servers and issues with server load. To avoid such scenarios, it is critical to prohibit abusive bot clicks.
With a traffic cop, measure and block.
Traffic Cop is an all-in-one Invalid Traffic Solution that detects and stops all sorts of invalid click activity on your website, including bots, spam clicks, abusive clicks, and other ad fraud variants. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, this click fraud protection technology can detect and stop both manual and automated spam clicks in seconds. Traffic Cop was used by publishers such as Androidwaves to eradicate all spam clicks on their adverts and to prevent more advanced invalid click activities.
The Traffic Cop dashboard keeps real-time track of all bot-proofing activity. Our technology forecasts the possibility of spam clicks, abusive clicks, and click farms on your ads in real-time. Once configured, you can sit back and relax because Traffic Cop will measure and block any spam and invalid click activity with no action from you.
