PPC advertising is a proven method for attracting prospects to your website and brand. As a marketer, you have to work with a budget, and you want to make the most of your marketing dollars. PPC, of course, is a cost-effective marketing tactic because you only pay when someone clicks your ads, and B2B companies often rely on this method for capturing leads quickly and efficiently.
The problem, however, is that click fraud has become quite prevalent these days and can make your marketing efforts go in vain. It might be your competitors trying to outrank you by consuming your PPC budget for the day through fake clicks or bots targeting expensive keywords and generating fake clicks and views in millions every day to scrape information. Whatever the case, B2B marketers can implement certain measures to avoid this.
How to Protect PPC Ads from Click Fraud?
Before we look into some tips on protecting your PPC ads from click fraud, it’s worth mentioning that Google has already taken strict measures to combat this issue. The systems they have implemented automatically identify potentially automated, accidental, or fraudulent clicks and discard them. Google’s anti-click fraud program includes:
While these systems ensure your marketing budget is not depleted due to click fraud, there are things you can do at your end to avoid it. Follow the tips below to protect your B2B PPC campaigns against click fraud.
1. Set Up IP Exclusions
If you have information on the IP addresses involved in click fraud, you can set up IP exclusions to ensure your ads are not served to the suspicious IPs again. You can do that from your Google Ads account and shouldn’t have any problems doing so. While it’s an effective method to have some click fraud protection, it may be very time-consuming if you have to block a long list of IPs.
2. Keep a Check on Your Competitors
It is very much likely that your competitors might want to steal your top spot away and gain a competitive edge by tanking your advertising budgets. Therefore, you must pay close attention to your competitors who are also bidding on the same keywords as you are. Check the paid search competition to determine if the keywords you plan to target have commercial intent. Also, check for commercial intent for some of the relevant keywords and try to find more specialized keywords. It will help lower your competition while increasing the chances of clicks and conversions. To avoid click fraud from competitors, click tracking tools like iSpionage and SEMrush can be helpful. They will help you find out when your competitors clicked your ads so that you can report those clicks.
3. Target High-Value Sites Only
Click fraud often happens at low-quality websites. Ditch them by running your PPC ads on more relevant websites where your potential customers might be. Search engines let you create ads that run only on the websites you have specified. Targeting specific websites to serve ads also makes B2B PPC campaigns more effective because B2B marketers have a limited audience to address.
4. Monitor Your Campaigns And Report Invalid Clicks
Your PPC campaigns may not always bring genuine visitors to your landing page; therefore, you should always monitor them closely. You can check the numbers in your Account Performance and Campaign Performance reports. In these reports, Google has also categorized a percentage of clicks as invalid. Once you get the numbers for invalid clicks, always reconcile your costs, and if the reimbursements from your account don’t match, create a support ticket to nullify the costs incurred due to invalid clicks.
5. Use Click Fraud Detection Software
Many sophisticated click fraud detection software solutions are available today. They are designed to detect click fraud related to your PPC campaigns and offer protection against it. These programs closely monitor the traffic coming from your Google Ads and blacklist invalid click sources automatically.
If you’re a B2B marketer facing inflated costs on your PPC ads, you’re likely dealing with click fraud. Use the tips above to fix the issue and make your PPC campaigns produce the desired results.
While Google continuously releases updates to its algorithm, marketers need to evolve their SEO strategy accordingly to stay ahead of the competition. If your real estate PPC ads seem to be underperforming, it’s about time you optimize your PPC campaigns for better performance, generating more qualified leads, and hence, the revenue.
But what should you do to create a winning PPC ad strategy for your real estate business? Here are a few tips to help improve your ad performance.
Use Detailed Demographic Targeting to Reach Your Prospects
In the last few years, Google has introduced a few new ways of reaching the target audiences for real estate businesses based on demographics. These new categories for better targeting include:
To optimize your real estate PPC campaigns, you can choose to target, exclude, or observe these audience segments. You may also use these categories in combination to reach a more targeted audience segment.
For instance, you may be targeting renters looking to buy a home and can set your campaigns to target audiences in “Detailed demographics: Renters” and “Life events: Purchasing a home” combined.
There may be some nuances, but these demographic targeting options can turn out to be invaluable for your real estate PPC campaigns. Layering your targeting criteria is also a good idea to reach the most targeted audiences.
Improve Your Ad Quality Score
The ad quality score is a good way to gauge the quality and effectiveness of your PPC ad campaigns. It measures:
Optimize your ads for these metrics, and you’ll achieve a higher ad quality score. The greater the score, the better the results you’ll get.
Rely on Google’s Recommendations
Google uses AI and machine learning to give real-time recommendations, allowing advertisers to easily figure out how their ads can be improved. If you’re not too tech-savvy, rely on Google’s recommendations to improve your real estate PPC campaigns. It will help you improve your CTR while reducing CPC.
Optimize Your Ads for Voice Searches
Since Google introduced the ‘Voice Search’ feature, it’s been trending. Today, almost half of Google searches are voice-based. So, it goes without saying that your real estate PPC campaigns should be optimized for these searches.
These searches are usually longer and can greatly impact the keyword match type you should be using and the type of landing pages you should direct traffic to, depending on the user’s intent. For instance, if the user is looking for information, the landing page should be created for educating prospects about their query and, in the process, market your business to them.
Leverage the Power of Negative Keywords
Negative keywords refer to search criteria that prevent your ads from appearing in the SERPs. For example, if you are not interested in dealing with specific home types or properties, you can list them as negative keywords for your real estate PPC campaigns. Whenever the users will search for those negative keywords, your ad won’t appear in the search results. It will also help channel your marketing budget better.
In real estate marketing, every qualified lead matters. It is important that you optimize your real estate PPC campaigns to reach a targeted group of audiences for better lead generation. The tips above will help achieve your goal.
Have you noticed that your PPC ads aren't bringing as much business as you'd like to but there are lots of clicks made on them? Well, click fraud is most likely responsible for that. In this article, we're going to share with you four powerful ways to stop click fraud and increase your ROI.
Click fraud is the technique of inflating the number of clicks on a pay-per-click advertisement on the internet. This means that every click on an ad that has no chance of translating into actual revenue for the advertiser is considered click fraud.
Third-parties or publishers use either low-paid staff or bots to artificially increase how many times an ad link is clicked. The following are common motivations for click fraud:
Detecting click fraud on your PPC marketing account is crucial to the growth of your company. Nevertheless, it is not always as simple as it might be or as simple as advertisers want it to be. The following are red flags that your ad campaign may be a victim of click fraud:
Less business than usual
Even though you continue to spend the same amount on PPC ads, you notice fewer signups or purchases than you are used to.
The combination of a high number of clicks and a low number of conversions
A very helpful weapon in the fight against click fraud is an IP address. You may likely tell whether or not your visits are real by reviewing a list of all the IP addresses that hit on your ad. Unique visits are more likely to be authentic customers, whereas visits from the same machine or machines are an indication of fraudulent clicks on your advertising. Identification is an essential initial step in combating click fraud, even though it is not preventative in the traditional sense.
How to Prevent Click Fraud
Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of distinguishing legitimate from fraudulent clicks, analyzing the IP address on every ad click would be complex and time-consuming and certainly not the most economically effective approach. I
n the past, the only method to stop click fraud was by manually sifting through all the IP addresses and looking for trends, but for advertisers with the greatest click-through rates, this is not a very workable approach.
Use Click Fraud Prevention Software
Fortunately, there are various anti-click fraud services available to advertisers. These are automated tools that look at the data for you and block IP addresses that are suspected of being fake. By removing fraudulent clicks, click fraud prevention software can significantly lower employee overhead costs and increase your bottom line. Features such as the ability to set thresholds for how many times an IP address can follow an advertising link and immediately remove suspected click fraud make these services an invaluable tool for online advertisers fighting unwanted clicks.
Finally, as an online advertising scam, PPC click fraud will cost you money, as would attempting to combat it manually.
The most effective, easiest, and least expensive option is to use automated click fraud prevention software like ClickReport. With its help, you'll not only be able to quickly detect PPC click fraud but also prevent fraudulent clicks on your ads.