Let’s face it - paid search advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your site, but the monitoring and upkeep of your campaigns can be very time consuming. Now, add in the task of detecting PPC click fraud. Yikes, we’re starting to get beyond the time limits for many small business marketing departments.
PPC click fraud is an on-going concern for marketing managers such as myself who don’t want to surrender budget dollars to devious competitors clicking on my ad. I believe search engines such as Google are doing a pretty good job of detecting fraud. I routinely see refunds on my invoice from bad click dollars they’re giving back. But, I know their monitoring is not catching all of the bad clicks.
Once a week I take 10 minutes and look at my Google Analytics to see how many competitor clicks I have from my PPC campaigns. No, this is not going to catch all of the other bad clicks that the search engines miss, but occasionally I will see a large amount of clicks from a competitor and I’ll report it to the search engines. Here is what I do:
1. Select a Time Frame
2. Under Search Engine Marketing, select All PPC Analysis or AdWords Analysis
3. You should now see your PPC campaigns. Click the down arrow next to one of the campaigns, select Cross Segment Performance, and then select Network Location
This will provide you with a list of the networks from which people clicked on your paid search ad. Typically, you’ll be able to see company names of where the networks reside. Like I said earlier, this is not a 100% guarantee to nab offending clicks, but it should give you a pretty good picture.
If your time is strapped and click fraud is destroying your PPC campaigns, don’t give up - get help. BtoB magazine did a great feature on click fraud this month. There were three quality articles worth reading. They provide real life examples of click fraud and some detailed methods for correcting the problem. Here are the three articles online.
- Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2% by Marketing Pilgrim
- Troubling findings on how some third parties detect click fraud by Inside AdWords
- Meet the Click Quality team by Inside AdWords
- Google Pushes Back On Click Fraud Estimates, Says Don’t Forget The Back Button by Search Engine Land
- Yahoo : No Click Fraud, But Plenty of Goodwill by Search Engine Journal
- Tracking Click Fraud by Search Engine Guide
- Click Fraud Minimization Strategies by Search Engine Guide
Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs…
by: Jon MillerHere are over 50 blogs that talk about B2B marketing, as well as a few that focus on selling, search engine marketing, and copy writing. I will update (add or remove) the list as I change the B2B……
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Thank you for the detailed tips on how to monitor Pay Per Click click fraud using Google Analytics. It was really great for you to include the screen shots to allow your readers to follow along visually.
I have been wanting to promote my company by implementing ppc, but I was afraid my competition would do someting like this. If i do decide to use PPC as an advertising tool I will most definitely refer back to this site.