PPC Trick 6: Catching click fraud and getting refunds.

When I was a about 11 I had a few friends from school who
used to deliver pamphlets to earn some pocket money. They
were paid to ride their bikes around the neighborhood and
drop these pamphlets into people's letterboxes. The more
they delivered, they more they were paid.

I was interested in becoming one of these delivery boys, so
I started asking a few questions to determine how well the
job paid. I clearly remember being shocked as one guy
explained to me his methodology.

He said, "You get paid by the 1000. So what I do is go and
deliver a few hundred and then dump the rest down at the
creek. That way you get paid for 1000, but only have to
deliver a few hundred. No one seems to notice."

I remember being shocked at this. My father was in
business and I knew that if he had paid good money to have
these pamphlets printed and delivered only to be dumped, he
would have been furious. Not cool at all.

Move forward 20 years and these same offline advertising
problems are still with us in PPC advertising in the form of
"click fraud" or "invalid clicks". As Wikipedia eloquently
states:

"Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when
a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a
legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the
purpose of generating an improper charge per click."

Much of our PPC advertising is being "dumped down at the creek"
so to speak. How can we stop it?

I've personally seen (across hundreds of thousands of
clicks) a raw invalid click rate of about 30%. Many PPC
providers will catch quite a bit of this, but I have never
seen them catch it all. Let's face it, there can't be very
much motivation for them to reduce the number of clicks they
are charging for.

So what can you do about it? The answer is, "Track for it."

I personally believe that you should be tracking all of your
advertising and checking for click fraud should be a part of
this. Once your tracking is in place, you can then do some
reconciliation between your own stats and the stats the
your PPC provider gives you.

Don't just advertise blindly. Take control over it by
tracking it closely. I'm sure you'll be surprised at what
you find.

All the best,