Is search engine optimisation (SEO) better than adwords? Adword Fraud... It is topic that comes up in all our presentations, some clients are very well aware that click fraud does occur with their adword campaigns and some just interested to know what they can do about it. What I wonder is, when Google are charging such high amounts for these ad words to be purchased, do they take into account the 10% fraud amount that they admit to? A man once said to me, “It’s kind of like buying a carton of eggs from a corner store. You are purchasing 12 eggs but the shop keepers knows there are 3 broken ones in the carton.”

Click fraud is a very real concern for anybody who is doing CPC marketing. Click fraud involves any artificially created click on your ad. A human being can create these clicks, or a software program called a clickbot can create them. Unfortunately these clicks cost you money.

The hard part is identifying click fraud. In order to do this you need to constantly monitor your campaigns, keeping a watchful eye out for any abnormalities. You need to pay attention to your campaign’s established trends and watch for any divergence in those trends. For example, suppose you have an Adgroup that averages an 8% CTR. Minor variations to this CTR are normal and expected. What happens, however, if this Adgroup spikes to a 15% CTR without warning? What do you do?

The first thing you need to do in such a case is check to see if there are any logical reasons for this spike. For example, was there some media coverage on your industry that would cause an increase in searches for your keywords? There can be perfectly reasonable explanations for unexpected traffic spikes. Did you experience an increase in sales? This is another good indicator of real traffic. If your sales correspond to your traffic everything should be fine.

If the traffic still seems fraudulent you need to gather as much information as possible on the incident. A good idea would also be to record the time period when it happened and what keywords were affected. You could check your server logs and look for any suspicious looking IP addresses or user agents.

I understand that it is very time consuming as it is if you are managing your own adword campaign. Which here in Australia, most of the companies we deal with are because unless you are spending very large amounts with Google, you won’t have a dedicated Account Manager.

What I would suggest is, once you have collected all relevant information you should contact Google support and allow them to take over the investigation.