Answers
Jun 11, 2022 - 10:26 PM
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Online traffic and conversion are among the significant revenue drivers for eCommerce businesses. But, wherever there’s great profit to be made, there’s also fraud lurking. And click fraud has been steadily rising.
Click fraud—which often happen when a person or a bot clicks on an ad multiple times while seeming to be a real user but with no desire to complete the purchase—can be pretty challenging for young businesses.
And that’s because they can exhaust the marketing budget, reduce click quality, and generally affect any business’s performance by providing faulty business data.
Today, most businesses have turned to click fraud prevention tools like Clickcease and ClickGUARD for safety. But are these tools any good? Let’s find out.
Extra Reasons Why You Must Tackle Click Fraud
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According to Imperva, 38% of web traffic originates from bots.
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Click fraud was found to cost marketers 42 billion USD in 2021, with click farms openly advertising and selling their services for as low as $5/1000 clicks.
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Click farms committed about 90% of click frauds. And no industry is safe from them, including eCommerce.
So, How Effective are Click Fraud Tools?
First, understand that anyone can commit click fraud, and sometimes countless ordinary folks do this unknowingly. This is especially common on YouTube mobile ads where half of all clicks (by some estimates) are accidental. The user interface seems to have been designed purposely to get people to click on adds accidentally, which is a bad experience for users and even worse for brands that pay for them. But hey, someone's gotta pay for all the free YouTube usage :) But I digress.
And although accidental clicks, brand haters, competitors, bots, and click farms are some of the most popular perpetrators of click fraud, several click fraud tools are great at combating click fraud, and they do that by leveraging:
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Machine Learning
Several click fraud detection software relies on machine learning algorithms that constantly analyze online traffic for fraud. And the best part of using machine learning is that the AI’s capacity improves the more data it analyzes.
Clickcease, an excellent click fraud tool, has been running for several years, and in 2020, the tool monitored over 9 million clicks and filtered over 800,000 invalid inputs per day.
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Ever-Evolving Knowledge of Online Security
Click fraud prevention companies are well versed in the digital and online security sphere. These companies make it their goal to constantly improve their services and stay up-to-date on the innovations happening in AI, malware, and botnets.
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Massive Fraud Database
Having a massive bank of fraud data is very useful for detecting recurring patterns, pre-emptively freezing click frauds, and keeping a blacklist of perpetrators’ data. All of which can come in handy when dealing with click frauds.
Don't take chances with click frauds. Always ensure you get a trusted click fraud software that’d help free your business from the effects of click fraud.
Jun 11, 2022 - 10:37 PM
YouTube mobile though, is a different story. Here, the product seems to be designed to capture accidental clicks and you won't get a refund on these.
The big gripe I have with Google is Ad Sense (i.e display ads on the content network). There are lots of sites that make their internal links ad clicks so when you click on a link to read the next news story, say, it pops up an ad. The advertiser pays for this click even though the user clearly never intended it. These news sites do this because click through rates on ads have been falling over the years and to make money, they have to use these kind of shady tactics.
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