What kind of clicks are considered invalid?
- Manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs
- Clicks by automated tools, robots or other deceptive software
- Extraneous clicks that provide no value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click
PPC companies like Google Adwords closely monitor these and other scenarios to better protect you from receiving invalid clicks.
How do they detect invalid clicks?
The security of PPC advertisers is important and the PPC companies have a number of resources to protect your account against invalid activity:
Detection and filtering techniques:
Each click on a PPC advert is examined by the relevant PPC system. They look at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks and various other click patterns. Our system then analyses these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports.
This detection and filtering occurs over a number of levels including the following:
- Real-time systems filter out activity fitting a profile of invalid behavior (such as excessively repetitive clicks)
- Clicks and impressions from known sources of invalid activity are automatically discarded
Advanced monitoring techniques:
Various unique and innovative methods are applied at each stage of the filtering process, thereby maximising proactive detection of invalid activity. PPC engineers at Google are also constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters and examining a growing set of signals.
In addition to automated click protection techniques, some PPC companies have dedicated teams that use specialised tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When the Google Adwords system, for example, detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks. One of their main goals is to make invalid activity very difficult and unrewarding for unethical users, thereby decreasing their chance of success.
If you think you have been affected by invalid clicks Contact us now, we can help.
