Today we investigate the various PPC network options available to you alongside the benefits of using each. At the end of this article, you should be able to answer the question: “what is the best PPC ad network for my business?”

What are PPC Ad Networks?

Before we get into the list of the best PPC ad network options for your business, we must understand the definition of an ad network.

Ad networks are platforms that link ad publishers with advertisers. Ad publishers refer to individuals or companies who want to sell ad space on their website because they own a digital content property with an audience. Publishers effectively offer up some of the space in that content property to external ads.

These ads come from advertisers; any individual or company who wants to promote a product or service. However, it would take considerable time for these advertisers to contact hundreds of ad publishers, and so they take advantage of the power of a PPC ad network to do it for them.

Advertisers get to use a single space – the PPC ad network – to pay for ads, which this ad network then distributes across the internet where available, and more importantly, where applicable. A massive part of what the ad networks handle for the advertisers is placing the ads in the digital spaces where the audience of said advertisers is more likely to be present.

One of the main differences between ad networks and other advertising methods that make use of publishers – such as affiliate marketing or sponsored posts – is that they provide a much more automated and hands-off marketing option.

Think of the ad network as the intermediary between the publishers and the advertisers. You can also expect to find a range of useful tools on these platforms. You can expect tools for keyword research, ad creation, budget management, budget optimization, and a range of analytics for your different campaigns.

How Does the PPC Ad Network Process Work?

Ad networks do not work the same for advertisers and publishers. Advertisers create ad campaigns and decide how you want to bid on keywords and phrases. Based on your bidding structure you will then pay a fee every time someone clicks through one of your ads to your platform. The most common bidding structures include:

• Pay Per Click, shown as CPC (Cost Per Click).
• Pay Per Thousand Impressions, shown as CPM (Cost Per Mile).
• Pay Per Acquisition, shown as CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).

While these bidding strategies are the most popular, some platforms such as Google or Meta (Formerly Facebook) have a more diverse selection of options for further customization.

However, if you are a publisher, you will need to join the network through a review process. You must pass this review process before you can start selling ad space on your digital platform. Once you pass the review, you can place ads on your website in a variety of ways. The most common include a code snippet that handles the ad cycling for you, or receiving bids from advertisers and then deciding which ads you want to display.

What are the Different Types of Ad Networks?

As there are advertising network providers, there are also different types of advertising networks. These different types of ad networks include:

Vertical Networks

Vertical networks specialize in advertising for highly specific audiences. These networks often only advertise in one industry or niche. This niche approach means that you are less likely to find a vertical network that can assist with general advertising.

Premium Networks

Premium networks work specifically with high-traffic websites from top-tier publishers and creators. These networks are naturally more expensive, but given the publishers they provide access to, you can expect a large number of eyes on your advertisements.

Inventory-Specific Networks

Inventory-specific networks operate similarly to vertical networks in that they have a niche. The main difference is that where the niches of vertical networks are for a specific industry or product type, the niches of inventory-specific networks are for a content type that hosts the ads. An example of an inventory-specific network would be one that only places ads on mobile apps or music streaming services.

Targeted Networks

Targeted networks utilize incredibly specific criteria for ad placement, making it a good choice for advertisers who prefer not to cast a wider net. The criteria that targeted networks focus on for ad placement can include a variety of consumer traits from location to user behaviour to demographics.

Performance and Affiliate PPC Ad Networks

Performance and affiliate PPC ad networks focus on the actions of users rather than simply displaying ads in specific places. You will pay these networks based on specific criteria such as users signing up, making purchases, or simply clicking through to your website.

What are the Different Types of PPC Platforms?

There are different types of pay-per-click advertising sites. It is not atypical for a platform to offer more than one of these PPC advertising types, which include:

Search

A Search PPC ad network commonly helps advertisers create campaigns that target searches for relevant keywords or phrases on search engines. Through these ad networks, you can typically identify and bid on keywords relevant to your services or products and even track the performance of these keywords or phrases.

Businesses that want to drive more qualified traffic and potentially increase conversions often utilize Search PPC ad networks. An example of a Search PPC ad would be a Google Search campaign, which allows you to target customers searching for specific terms such as “computer parts” or “family restaurants”.

Display

Display PPC ad networks provide digital ads that can appear at the top, on the side, or in the middle of viewed web content. These networks help you increase your brand awareness and engagement by targeting users who need to actively search for your products or services. These ads are often displayed to a wider audience to increase reach.

An example of Display PPC ads would be Google Display Network (GDN). This service allows advertisers to create ads that GDN then displays to a specific demographic or previous customers.

Social Media

Social media PPC networks use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for a variety of purposes. These purposes range from increasing brand awareness to building a new audience and even engaging with potential customers. Based on your business requirements, you can tailor your campaigns to focus on specific demographics, locations, customer interests, and more.

Facebook Ads is an example of a social media PPC network that provides advertisers with the ability to create highly targeted campaigns that use data like age, gender, location, and even general interests. Additionally, these tools often come with insights and data analytics to help you improve future ads or iterate better on existing campaigns.

As you navigate the dynamic landscape of pay-per-click advertising, safeguarding your campaigns against potential threats is paramount. ClickGUARD™ emerges as the ultimate shield, ensuring your ad networks remain resilient in the face of click fraud.

Get Protected

The 9 Best PPC Ad Networks for Marketers

As mentioned, there are several PPC networks available to advertisers and depending on their business requirements, some will work better than others. However, in terms of general capabilities and overall scores, we have put together a list of the 9 best PPC ad network options, starting with the biggest of them all, Google.

Google Ads

There is no denying the sheer presence of Google, which makes it no surprise that they own by far the largest share of PPC advertising networks – sitting at a massive 73% of the global market share. Google sees more than 100,000 searches every second, more than eight billion every day, and more than 2 trillion every year. No other search engine comes close to this amount of traffic.

Given the size of Google, it’s only natural that Google Ads provides the largest PPC ad network available. However, even those looking for free tools will find some value from Google Analytics and Keyword Planner. Additionally, Google Display Network is the industry’s leading display PPC ads platform available to a variety of websites like YouTube, Blogger, and more.

Advertisers should note that due to its popularity, PPC ads on Google can prove expensive, especially for keywords with excessive competition.

Benefits of Google Ads Network

• By far the biggest global reach given their sheer number of daily users.
• Google Ads offer many different bidding strategies that assist with:
  • Conversions
  • Clicks
  • Visibility
  • Interactions
• Large number of free and paid tools to help you optimize your PPC campaigns.
• Largest number of website selections for Display PPC ads.
• Extensive analytics and reporting for better campaign iteration.
• Customization options for a variety of customer targeting methods.

Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads)

Next up we have the second largest PPC network with Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft will come up in every list that contains the biggest names in tech, so it’s no surprise they placing as the second largest PPC network.

Bing – and consequently Microsoft Advertising – does not have the reach of Google Ads, but for those seeking cheaper alternatives it might be a clear winner. Similar to Google, Microsoft Advertising has a selection of bidding strategies and tools like paid search engine results or display PPC options. Microsoft also has a good selection of websites for those who want to display banners, videos, or content ads. These platforms include Yahoo!, AOL, and even MSN.

Microsoft has a fairly busy search engine coming in at just over five billion searches per month on the platform, which is no small feat. Microsoft also owns about 36% of the market share in the USA, 20% of the market share in the UK, and one-third of the total global market share.

Benefits of Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads)

• Massive amounts of traffic even though they are second in comparison to Google.
• Has a sizable market share in the USA and UK, making it a good option for advertisers marketing in those regions.
• Less competition for PPC ads on the network naturally makes most options more affordable than Google.
• Good number of website options for display banners, videos, and content ads.
• Microsoft’s PPC ad network tends to have users from high-earning backgrounds.
• Automated bidding strategies available.
• Cross-channel exposure for your ads given Microsoft’s collaboration with Roku.

Meta Ads (Facebook Ads)

In third place is another tech giant that many might still refer to by its old name, Facebook. Meta Ads provide businesses with a different – albeit still good – ad network. Meta does away with the emphasis on searches and focuses much more on demographic targeting.

Meta Ads do not rely on your customers actively searching for your products. Meta instead matches ads up to customers based on a variety of aspects from interests to demographics and even location. These ad matches occur on two of the world’s biggest social media platforms, namely Meta (Facebook) and Instagram.

You can also make your ads available on Facebook Messenger or the Facebook Audience Network. These options make Meta Ads a solid option for businesses who want to advertise within the mobile application space.

Benefits of Meta Ads (Facebook Ads)

• Top-tier choice for businesses that want to utilize demographic-specific targeting.
• Native content ads can prove more effective at times since customers do not have to search for your products first.
• Ideal place for businesses who prefer to create visual ad campaigns.
• You are not required to bid on keywords since the algorithms handle who sees your ads.
• Businesses who prefer to advertise within apps can thrive here.
• Cheaper PPC ad network than Google or Microsoft.

Taboola Ads

Taboola operates similarly to Google AdSense and Google Display Network but works with a carefully curated list of websites. Advertisers pay to have their ads displayed on Taboola’s partner sites – specifically news websites.

Taboola can help place your ads on massive websites like Business Insider, CNBC, NBC News, Fox News, AOL, and MSN – often at more affordable prices than other options on the list. Those who wish to advertise here must make engaging content that can draw readers of the news sites to their own products, so it requires some finesse. You have options for either CPM or CPC Pay-Per-Click bids.

All the websites on Taboola’s partner list have more than a million visitors per month. Compared to Google AdSense – where publisher websites can have any amount of traffic – Taboola offers a greater possibility for more eyes on your campaign.

Benefits of Taboola Ads

• Ideal for all forms of content marketing.
• Much lower CPC compared to other PPC ad networks.
• Only partnered with high-quality websites that have more than a million monthly visitors.
• Good place to retarget people who previously engaged with your campaigns.
• You have control to prevent your content from appearing on certain partnered websites or certain news topics.

LinkedIn Ads

Touted as the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn offers a PPC ad network allowing you to reach a learned marketplace with reliable purchasing power. LinkedIn Ads allow you to target specific demographics – although unlike Facebook these demographics are more likely marketers, C-level executives, and business owners.

Given the user base, LinkedIn Ads is a good place for B2B ads, especially if your business wants to further customize how your ads appear. You can utilize sponsored posts, InMail (direct mailing to specific audiences), text ads, dynamic ads, and a display partner network.

You can expect a minimum bid of around $2 for CPC and CPM advertisements, while they offer a Cost-Per-Send model for InMail ads.

Benefits of LinkedIn Ads

• The quality of the audience is often hard to beat, especially if you have a B2B company.
• You have options for native and non-native ads.
• You have options for direct mail marketing.
• You can customize your marketing to target specific demographics across detailed verticals like industry, job title, size of company, and more.
• LinkedIn Ads provides access to lead generation forms which makes it simpler to manage your leads.

X Ads (Formerly Know as Twitter)

Another social media giant providing a solid platform for businesses seeking PPC options for straightforward marketing. With close to half a billion active users worldwide, X offers a good ad network for a variety of industries.

Your X ads will appear in the feeds of users, so they look similar to ordinary tweets. You can also opt to have ads appear in the ‘Who to Follow’ sections of search results if you want to promote a business account instead.

Given that X users are primarily accessing the platform on mobile, it’s a solid choice for businesses who want to meet their clients in an app.

Benefits of X Ads

• Variety of ad options include text, image, video, carousel, live, or moment ads.
• Decent CPC averaging at around $0.33.
• Access to a wide variety of audiences worldwide.
• Customers can interact with your ads and comment on them, or even retweet them.
• Excellent place to show off the personality of your business.

Amazon Publisher Services

Ideal for digital business, Amazon Publisher Services offers a range of PPC ad options. The big differentiating factor here compared to other options on the list is Amazon’s shopper data. This data allows you to place ads in front of customers based on shopping profile demographics in addition to typical options.

Ads can appear in a variety of places ranging from Amazon’s home page to displays that pop up in-search. Amazon also owns Twitch – one of the largest streaming platforms in the world – so your ads can naturally appear there as well.

Your ads can also take on various forms like product display ads, sponsored product ads, or video ads.

Benefits of Amazon Publisher Services

• Access to demographics centre more around shopper profiles.
• Excellent choice for reaching customers on mobile given the amount of people who shop on Amazon using mobile devices.
• Access to Twitch advertising which allows you to utilize channels with massive amounts of daily viewers.

Reddit Ads

With an estimated 1.5 – 1.6 billion visits in 2022 and around 15 minutes of average time spent on the platform with each visit, Reddit offers a good place to reach audiences outside of Meta, X, or Instagram.

Reddit offers three main types of ads including promoted posts, videos, and carousel ads. In addition, you can show Reddit ads to mobile users, making it a good option for desktop and mobile advertising. You can expect a fairly low CPC at around $0.44 per click.

Reddit houses several ‘subreddits’ which are essentially individual forums dedicated to specific topics, which makes it possible to target audiences based on their interests.

Benefits of Reddit Ads

• Fairly large social media platform with a massive number of active users.
• Offers a competitive CPC at around $0.44 per click.
• You can narrow down your content to specific demographics such as user interests.

Outbrain Ads

Outbrain is similar to Taboola in that it is also focused on content marketing on partnered websites. Outbrain includes a massive number of partner websites like CNN, The Washington Post, WSJ, The Guardian, and MSN.

In addition to Outbrain’s good list of publisher websites, you can expect a reportedly low CPC of around $0.10 which is fantastic.

Benefits of Outbrain

• Offers a wide range of over 100,000 publisher websites.
• Lower CPC than most competitors.
• Offers dynamic retargeting that allows you to show users products or services they previously showed interest in.

Maximize the Value of Any PPC Campaign With ClickGUARD™

With so many businesses utilizing the power of pay-per-click advertising sites, it’s easy to forget the importance of making sure you maximize your value. Whichever of the nine best PPC ad network options you prefer to go with, it’s important to secure your ads against click fraud.

Click fraud can skew your metrics and increase the prices of your CPCs even though the clicks are not coming from real people.
When you use ClickGUARD™, you can expect a powerful click fraud prevention tool that helps you protect your business CPCs so you can reach intended targets with increased efficacy. Start your free ClickGUARD™ trial today and integrate leading click fraud protection into your campaigns.

In this article, we will discuss the top 11 causes of wasted ad spend to help you identify whether your business receives maximum returns on PPC marketing campaigns. But before we get into the top reasons for wasted ad spend, let’s clear up some concepts.

What is Wasted Ad Spend?

Wasted ad spend refers to money spent on marketing campaigns that do not result in generated profit for your business. Wasted ad spend does not affect only a specific marketing sector and can occur within digital and traditional marketing campaigns. However, it’s worth noting that wasted ad spend is generally more applicable in PPC campaigns.

An example of wasted spend would be spending $2000 on an ad campaign to promote your latest holiday sales. Your data later shows that only 42% of people clicked through to your page to see your sales. This metric means that 58% of people did not click through to your page, and therefore do not even know about your sales. You ultimately see that your ad expenses exceed your profit for said campaign, resulting in wasted spend.

The simplest way to consider this is: if your profit from a marketing campaign is less than the expenses for that campaign, you experienced wasted spend.

How Can You Combat Wasted Ads Spend

You cannot rid your business of wasted ad spend with a simple press of a button or quick advertising budget cut. The best way to combat wasted ad spend is to identify the source of the waste. Once you identify the source, you can take relevant steps to resolve the problem. There are many sources for wasted ad spend, and the approach to resolving your waste differs with each.

What Are the 11 Top Causes for Wasted Ad Spend?

Getting ahead of wasted ad spend starts with identifying the source of the problem. Below we have compiled a list of 11 top causes for waste spend, why it’s a problem, and how you can address each.

Poorly Crafted Ad Copy

Poor ad copy creates more than readability problems for your marketing. Poor ad copy can result in underperforming click-through rates due to messages not resonating properly with your audience. Additionally, having campaigns that are too like your competitors means you have a harder time standing out above the competition. Last, poor ad copy can also mean implementing messages that lack relevance to your target market, resulting in bad ROAS, and a decrease in Google Ads Quality Scores.

How to fix poorly crafted ad copy: always focus on keeping your ad copy relevant and your messaging concise so that your target market can immediately identify it as something for them. Keep your copy unique – or find a unique spin – so that your target market can remember it.

Poor Landing Page Design

There are millions of poorly designed landing pages, and they are often easy to spot. When a customer clicks on a link, the last thing they need is an overwhelming wall of text, excessively fast-moving images, and poor value proposition placement. Your campaigns might convert clicks, but that means little if your landing page scares customers away due to complexity or simply being a mess.

How to fix poor landing page design: reconsider your UX design by asking yourself some questions. What is the most essential information my clients want when arriving on your website? How can you display the most essential information with the least amount of clutter? If a client clicks through one of your ad links, they want to see the reason they clicked through in front of them.

Incorrect Bidding Strategies

Bidding strategies are how you tell Google which KPI to prioritize. You bid for individual keywords or ad groups relevant to your marketing campaigns. There are many different bidding strategies that fall under two categories: automatic bidding and manual bidding. Picking the wrong type for your marketing campaign can result in suboptimal returns, which ultimately wastes money.

How to fix incorrect bidding strategies: research the diverse types of bidding strategies and find which option best suits your type of campaign. Factors that you should consider include campaign goals and budget, your competition, and which ad platform you use.

Lack of Historical Performance Data Use

There is a reason data has become the most valuable commodity of the 21^st century. Data is relevant for so many sectors of business, and it all mainly serves one purpose: to improve product and service delivery relevance to customers. You should keep every bit of information on historical ad spend – and specifically, the results of that ad spend – as it allows you to pinpoint where to improve.

How to fix a lack of historical performance data use: if you do not already have systems in place to capture your data for later review, doing so should be your first step. If you do have such systems in place, start reviewing your ad spend and revenue data when crafting new campaigns. Consider doubling down on strategies that yielded the best results and consider doing away with strategies that resulted in wasted spend. 

Incorrectly Implemented Automated Campaigns

Automated campaign types like Google’s Performance Max can do wonders for your marketing. However, if you do not take the time to understand the system and set it up properly, you risk suboptimal returns. Wasted spend from poorly executed automated campaigns is even worse in a B2B environment where CPCs are more expensive.

How to fix incorrectly implemented automated campaigns: always consider automated tools as systems that require consistent guidance and monitoring. If you do not guide it away from the wrong results, it will keep delivering poor results. Make sure you check in on your automated tools regularly to monitor their performance and tweak it where necessary.

As you navigate the dynamic landscape of pay-per-click advertising, safeguarding your campaigns against potential threats is paramount. ClickGUARD™ emerges as the ultimate shield, ensuring your ad networks remain resilient in the face of click fraud.

Get Protected

Focusing on Leads Over Revenue

While MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) are always important, they should never become the focus over generating revenue. Getting MQLs is not synonymous with generating revenue, which means you could end up with marketing campaigns that find MQLs but never close.

How to fix focusing on leads over revenue: always make sure that your campaigns focus on revenue first. Getting MQLs is important, but it means little if it never results in revenue.

Unrefined Ad Audiences

You should always refine your campaigns with Google’s demographic exclusion tools. If you do not use these tools, you are widening the range of your campaigns to include demographics you are not trying to target. This lack of exclusion will result in your campaign casting a wider net so to speak, which could yield fewer returns than targeting more accurately.

How to fix unrefined ad audiences: always utilize demographic exclusion tools for your ads since they allow you to remove irrelevant demographics from your list of targets. Focus on the target market you want to sell to instead of casting a wider net that includes target markets you know might not buy your products.

Lack of Robust Conversion Tracking

Any PPC campaign should utilize the right conversion tracking tools to further optimize your campaign algorithms. If you put bad data into your algorithms, you cannot expect to get anything but bad results out of it.

How to fix a lack of robust conversion tracking: utilize powerful conversion tracking tools from ClickGUARD™ to improve the quality of your data. You can then feed this higher-quality data back into your algorithms to boost your results.

Not Updating Ad Creatives

You cannot keep taking the same approaches to advertising over and over, and you certainly cannot keep using the same ad creatives. Even if your ads work today, the conversion rates will start to decline in the future. If you do not have people working on new campaign ideas consistently, you can easily fall into the trap of keeping the same ads alive while returns decline.

How to fix not updating ad creatives: make sure you always have a team working on updating your ad creatives. Your audience will evolve, and it’s important to adapt and evolve alongside them if you want more than mediocre returns.

Fake Ad Engagements and Invalid Traffic

In 2022 alone, click fraud cost an estimated $44 billion. Additionally, an estimated 14% of all PPC clicks are estimated to be fraud. Fake clicks warp analytics, and if you then use that data in your future campaigns, you can expect warped results. Without implementing a reliable click fraud prevention system, you will experience click fraud on all your PPC campaigns.

How to fix fake ad engagements and invalid traffic: utilize a powerful click fraud prevention system like ClickGUARD™.

Not Investing Enough in Retargeting

Not investing in retargeting means you are effectively always looking for new customers, but not supporting existing MQLs. You should consider concentrating a substantial portion of your ad spend on retargeting MQLs since you know they already have an interest in your business. However, keep in mind that as mentioned above, never focus on MQLs over revenue.

How to fix not investing enough in retargeting: make sure you have a decent portion of your ad spend going towards retargeting MQLs. Retargeting increases branded search queries which have 100% higher conversion rates.

Start Preventing Wasted Ad Spend with ClickGUARD™

While there are various common causes for wasted ad spend, the reality remains that click fraud causes considerable damage to your campaigns. Click fraud leads to skewed data which can hamper future campaigns and can even increase your CPCs, resulting in reduced revenue.

With ClickGUARD™, a powerful click fraud prevention tool, you can protect your business’ CPCs and reach your intended targets with increased efficacy. Start your free ClickGUARD™ trial today and start integrating our leading click fraud prevention into your campaigns.

However, since ClickGUARD 2.0 is a completely new platform, here’s what you need to know about moving things over.

Your user profile

With 2.0, we upgraded our user account management and security protocols. For this reason, it is impossible to reuse your existing login credentials.

Instead, we will create you a new user profile with your existing email, and upon successful migration you will receive an email to set a new password.

After setting a new password, you can login to ClickGUARD 2.0 at app.clickguard.com and start using the system.

New account structure

With 2.0, we are bringing forward multi-platform support, and this required some changes in the account structure.

Workspace – The workspace is your ClickGUARD account. You will be managing your websites, PPC accounts, your subscription and your teammates all under the same workspace. Of course, you can have multiple workspaces.

Website – You can manage different websites under the same workspace. Website is the main resource in advertising, and you will be reviewing analytics, reports, traffic, and managing multiple PPC accounts and protection settings for your websites.

PPC account – You can manage multiple PPC accounts from different ad platforms on the single website. PPC accounts are attributing to paid traffic, and can have separate analytics, reports and protection settings.

Account access – You can reuse access to your ad platforms for different PPC accounts. Whether it’s MCC accounts or OAuth authorizations, we’re bringing easier way to manage them.

Your Google Ads accounts

We will transfer all your accounts from Legacy to 2.0. Unfortunately, we can’t keep any clicks, rules or other data related to the accounts.

Based on your advertising history, we will extrapolate advertising domains from your accounts and group them into websites.

If you had accounts authorized with OAuth, these authorizations will be migrated as connections, providing reusable access to both MCC and standard accounts.

If you had any MCC accounts added, they will also be migrated as connections, providing reusable access to standard accounts.

As you navigate the dynamic landscape of pay-per-click advertising, safeguarding your campaigns against potential threats is paramount. ClickGUARD™ emerges as the ultimate shield, ensuring your ad networks remain resilient in the face of click fraud.

Get Protected

Click tracking

Your existing tracking code and tracking template will be backwards compatible, but we strongly suggest to update them to 2.0 versions to get the most out of new tracking and protection systems.

Your team members

Instead of creating new user profiles for every team member, we will simply invite them to collaborate on your newly created workspace, and they can accept the invitation from their inbox directly. They will retain previously defined roles and permissions.

Your subscription

With 2.0, we’ve adopted a new pricing model based on your ad spend. We believe that value provided can’t be measured with clicks alone, and that removal of unwanted and fraudulent traffic opens up multiple ways for you to boost your ROAS.

However, as our Legacy customer, you can keep your existing subscription price based on click volume when moving over to 2.0.

Your new ClickGUARD Legacy plan will start on your original next billing date, will have the same price and same click limit.

You can keep your Legacy plan indefinitely. If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, or enable access to Meta ads and other advertising platform, select one of our standard plans, or contact customer support for a custom quote.

Your legacy account

With new plan in place on 2.0, your legacy subscription will be put into cancelling mode, meaning it will not renew on the next billing date and will be cancelled instead.

How to migrate

Open the ClickGUARD Legacy app, and click on the green banner on top of the page. It will show you a brief overview of migration and what to expect.

There you can simply click on the green banner to start the migration.

For any assistance in this process, feel free to reach out to our customer support via chat, or email at support@clickguard.com.

FAQ

See you in ClickGUARD 2.0!

The problem with click fraud is that it can be quite challenging to detect and prevent. And the negative impact of click fraud are often more significant than many businesses realize: wasted ad spend, skewed campaign metrics, and – ultimately – ineffective online advertising campaigns are a big price to pay for something that can be avoided.

Click fraud is a growing problem in the digital advertising industry that affects businesses of all sizes. And while no industry is immune to the effects of click fraud, there are ways to detect and prevent click fraud from harming your advertising campaigns. In this article, we will examine the industries most affected by click fraud, how click fraud affects businesses, and what marketers can do to combat click fraud effectively.

Understanding Click Fraud

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a widely used digital marketing strategy, where advertisers pay for each click on their ads. However, the success of PPC advertising relies on the validity of the clicks generated on those ads. Unfortunately, there are instances where clicks on PPC ads may not be genuine and are intended to deceive advertisers for profit. This is where click fraud comes in.

Click fraud refers to any action that manipulates the number of clicks on an ad with the intent to exploit or harm the advertiser. The act of click fraud can be carried out in various ways, and it is essential for marketers to understand what constitutes fraudulent clicks versus invalid clicks to take appropriate action.

Google categorizes invalid clicks as clicks that are unintentional or generated by automated tools. This includes accidental clicks, such as when a user double-clicks on an ad, and clicks or impressions generated by bots or other automated tools.

However, fraudulent clicks are a more sinister form of invalid clicks. These clicks are generated intentionally with the aim of inflating the cost of advertising for competitors, or for website owners to make more profits. This can occur through the use of click farms, where individuals are paid to click on ads, or through the use of botnets that automate clicks.

While accidental clicks and other invalid clicks can be frustrating for marketers, click fraud can result in significant financial losses. In addition to wasting advertising budgets, fraudulent clicks can also lead to skewed analytics data, which can make it difficult for marketers to make informed decisions.

As such, it is essential for marketers to understand the difference between invalid and fraudulent clicks and take proactive measures to prevent and detect click fraud. This can include monitoring campaigns for irregular patterns of clicks, using software tools to detect click fraud, and setting up strict ad targeting parameters to reduce the risk of fraudulent clicks. By taking these steps, marketers can protect their advertising campaigns and maximize the return on their advertising investments.

Is your industry at risk?

There are two defining factors that increase the likelihood that a particular industry will be affected by click fraud are:

1. The amount of online traffic

Industries that have a lot of online traffic can be prime targets for click fraudsters because they can potentially generate a significant amount of fraudulent clicks. This is because the higher the traffic volume, the more difficult it is for ad networks to detect and filter out fraudulent clicks. Fraudsters can exploit this vulnerability by generating large volumes of clicks that are difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic. Additionally, the higher the traffic volume, the greater the potential revenue loss for advertisers, making these industries even more attractive targets.

2. The cost-per-click of relevant keywords

The cost-per-click of relevant keywords is another factor that can increase the likelihood of click fraud. Keywords that are relevant to high-value products or services tend to have higher costs-per-click (CPCs). For example, in the legal industry, keywords such as “personal injury lawyer” can have CPCs of up to $100. This makes these keywords more valuable to fraudsters, who can generate fraudulent clicks of higher value, driving up advertising costs for competitors significantly, or earning fraudsters more revenue through their own fake ads.

The following are examples of industries that are usually highly targeted by click fraud:

• Retail Industry

Click fraud is a major issue in the retail industry because of the nature of online shopping. With the increasing popularity of e-commerce, retailers are competing fiercely for a share of the online market. This competition means that advertisers are willing to pay higher prices for keywords related to their products, leading to a rise in cost-per-click (CPC). Unfortunately, this also makes the industry more vulnerable to click fraud.

Click fraudsters know that retailers are willing to pay high CPC prices for their ads, and they take advantage of this by creating fraudulent clicks on those ads.

• Financial Industry

As another industry with high-value keywords and fierce competition, finance and insurance companies are particularly vulnerable to click fraud. The cost per click (CPC) for keywords in financial services industries are often very high, making them lucrative targets for fraudsters looking to drive up the cost of clicks and drain advertising budgets.

• Travel Industry

The travel industry is another prime target for click fraud because of the high commissions that travel agencies and booking sites earn on bookings. Fraudsters can also use stolen credit card information to book fake reservations, which can lead to chargebacks and lost revenue for travel companies.

• Gaming Industry

The gaming industry is also at high risk of click fraud due to the popularity of mobile gaming apps. Fraudsters can use botnets or click farms to generate clicks on in-app ads, driving up advertising costs for game developers and publishers.

• Any online business

In addition to these industries, any business with a significant online presence, such as travel, healthcare, and education, can be at risk of click fraud. It’s essential for companies in these industries to be aware of the risk of click fraud and take proactive measures to protect their advertising campaigns. This can include using anti-fraud software, monitoring campaigns for irregular click patterns, and setting strict targeting parameters to reduce the risk of fraudulent clicks. By taking these steps, businesses can safeguard their advertising budgets and ensure that their advertising campaigns are reaching their intended audience.

3 ways click fraud affects your business

As if invalid clicks depleting your ad budget are not bad enough, click fraud can have a few other serious consequences for businesses. Here are three ways that click fraud can affect businesses: Click fraud affects businesses in three additional ways:

• Distorted campaign metrics
• Low ROAS
• Wasted time and effort for internal teams

1. Running campaigns blind

When a significant portion of clicks and traffic data come from invalid sources, it becomes impossible to accurately gauge the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Click fraud effectively prevents ads from reaching real customers, leaving marketers in the dark and unable to determine the true efficacy of their ad campaigns.

When campaign optimization is based on guesswork or inaccurate data, marketers also end up wasting precious time and resources on tasks with little to no return on investment. For instance, they may start optimizing high-traffic, low-performance campaigns hoping to improve conversion rates – instead of addressing the underlying issue of fraudulent clicks that skew campaign results.

Such guesswork can be a costly mistake, leading to wasted ad spend and decreased revenue. Campaigns optimized based on false data are unlikely to generate positive ROI, as they fail to effectively target actual customers. This not only hampers the success of current campaigns but also negatively impacts future advertising efforts, as marketing teams struggle to accurately analyze campaign results and adjust their strategies accordingly.

2. Ineffective campaigns with low ROAS

When businesses receive a high number of invalid clicks on their ads, they end up wasting their advertising budget on clicks that will never result in a conversion. This not only leads to a low ROAS – it also makes it difficult to determine which advertising channels and tactics are actually driving revenue.

Moreover, invalid clicks can negatively impact a business’s ability to find and attract new customers. When a business’s advertising budget is being consumed by invalid clicks, it limits their ability to target the right audience and ultimately reduces their reach. This can be especially detrimental for small businesses that rely on online advertising to attract new customers and compete with larger companies.

Without the ability to effectively reach their target audience, businesses risk being overshadowed by their competitors and losing out on valuable revenue. And without taking measures to block robots, businesses will continue to overpay for conversions and miss opportunities to reach their real audience.

3. Wasted time and effort for internal teams

In addition to distorting your ad campaign metrics, fraudulent clicks can lead your team to focus on non-revenue generating activities. For instance, fraudulent clicks can cause your sales team to pursue bogus prospects that were acquired through click bot traffic designed to mimic user behavior. These non-revenue generating leads may consume significant time and resources, leaving your team with less time to pursue legitimate leads that could actually generate revenue.

What business can do to fight click fraud

There are many things any digital marketer can do to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of click fraud, from supporting fraud-fighting initiatives on the industry level, raising internal awareness of click fraud issues on the company level, to utilizing third-party software designed to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks.

• Industry Level

Make use of industry initiatives to fight click fraud

• Company level

Raise internal awareness of click fraud issues

• Campaign level

Third-party software designed and other strategies to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) was created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to “focus on four core areas: eliminating fraudulent digital advertising traffic, combating malware, fighting ad-supported Internet piracy to promote brand integrity, and promoting brand safety through greater transparency.”  TAG works towards establishing an all-around healthy and transparent marketing ecosystem.  Among other initiatives, TAG has developed Certified Against Fraud Guidelines that will start being enforced in January 2022. The TAG certification program was launched in 2016 “to combat invalid traffic in the digital advertising supply chain.” In addition, TAG publishes benchmark reports on invalid clicks, regional snapshots, and best practices.  Despite the scale of click fraud and its effect on digital ad spend, this problem remains relatively obscure: according to the Google Trends charts above, it hasn’t been top-of-mind for marketers for quite some time.  Demonstrating how invalid clicks deplete your budget and skew your data is the first step in getting a go-ahead to fight the problem and develop effective strategies against them.  Here’s what digital marketers can do to increase internal click fraud awareness:

• Share information about internal marketing processes
• Establish expectations for tracking digital advertising spend and ROAS
• Include protection against fraudulent ad traffic in your information security plan
• Establish roles, set expectations and budgets, and determine performance indicators for click fraud protection initiatives when developing your next business plan

Know your industry and run regular paid click audits

Even though technological advances make it harder to do so, it remains possible to identify real users by their behavioral patterns. Once you know what your buyer’s digital journey looks like, you can use this information to protect yourself from click fraud.

In other words, if you know the behavioral patterns of your buyers, you can learn to identify anomalies. For example, if most of your customers fill out a form one week after being shown an initial ad, an influx of forms submitted by users who were shown the ad seconds before the form submission is likely to be a fraudulent attack.  In addition to understanding your industry, regular paid click audits can help you spot false traffic patterns and build an effective defense system for your marketing campaigns. By conducting regular audits, you can detect suspicious traffic and take appropriate measures to prevent click fraud from affecting your business.

The Best Way to Stop and Prevent Click Fraud

In a modern business climate that necessitates online advertising, the truth is that no industry is immune to click fraud.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to combat fraudulent traffic is by using click fraud protection software, such as ClickGUARD.

ClickGUARD is an essential tool for anyone running PPC ads, as it offers advanced algorithms to detect and prevent click fraud, bots, and other illegitimate clicks that can deplete your ad budget. With ClickGUARD, you can rest assured that your budget is being spent on real, legitimate clicks that drive conversions.

In addition to blocking unwanted clicks, ClickGUARD also provides detailed reports that give you insights into your campaign’s performance. This information can help you optimize your targeting and ad spend, ensuring that you get the most out of your advertising budget.

With the latest version of ClickGUARD, you also have access to fully automated features that make managing your campaigns easier than ever before, improved report tools, Google and Facebook Ads support, and a lot more.

If you’re a PPC advertiser, what are you waiting for? Waste less and convert more with ClickGUARD

FAQ

In this article, we’re going to talk about what exactly traffic bots are, how to identify them, and how to prevent them from impacting your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad campaigns.

What are Traffic Bots?

At its core, a traffic bot is a program application designed to mimic human traffic, generating non-human traffic to a website. By doing so, it provides the illusion of an increased number of visitors to the site, boosting metrics like pageviews, clicks, and even conversion rates. However, these metrics are entirely fake, leading marketers to believe that their campaigns are successful when, in reality, they are being sabotaged by bots.

Invalid clicks can be categorized into two types: harmless clicks and fraudulent clicks. Harmless clicks can be the result of accidental clicks by users or clicks from users who lack real purchase intent. However, fraudulent clicks are far more severe and can cause malicious harm to your campaigns. These harmful clicks are caused by click fraud, which involves the intentional clicking of your ads by competitors, publishers artificially inflating click revenue – or traffic bots.

Good Bots vs Bad Bots

There are two types of bots: good bots that are used for gathering information, and bad bots that generate clicks. Some bots infects user devices and generates clicks on their behalf. Other bot networks are more sophisticated and can be used by organizations to click on their competitor’s ads at scale, depleting their ad budget to free up ad space for their own ads. Click farms are also commonly used where laborers are paid to click on ads manually, which has a similar impact as bot networks.

Why Do You Have to Identify Bot Traffic?

Click fraud detection mechanisms have improved significantly in recent years, but cybercriminals who use bots to drive fraudulent traffic continue to develop more sophisticated codes and scripts. This is a serious cyber security issue that requires the attention of specialists. The bots used for click fraud are becoming more complex, and it is essential to keep up with their tactics in order to prevent them from hindering the performance of online ads. Detecting and identifying bot traffic is essential for several reasons:

It Ruins Your Analytics: Bot traffic can ruin your website analytics data, misleading you into making the wrong decisions. If you rely on metrics like bounce rate and session duration, your analysis will not show the real picture of your target audience’s behavior. Filtering out bot traffic is therefore necessary to avoid making the wrong marketing decisions that could hurt your business in various ways.

It Increases the Cost of Tools: Bot traffic also increases the cost of various tools and apps used by businesses. Most marketing, sales, and other tools charge based on traffic, which means that bot traffic will increase the cost for businesses. By filtering out bot traffic, businesses can save money and pay less for various tools and apps in the market.

It’s Related to PPC Fraud: One of the most significant reasons to identify bot traffic is to prevent PPC fraud. Bot traffic is extensively used in click fraud to sabotage competitors’ ad campaigns and earn money by selling fake clicks and ad impressions. By protecting your ads from click fraud and click bots you can optimize campaigns using legitimate metrics, improve ROAS by removing wasteful traffic, and get clicks on your ads that lead to real conversions.

How to Identify Bot Traffic

Differentiating between bots and humans is getting increasingly complicated, as bots replicate human behavior. Your analytics tool (e.g. Google Analytics) can’t detect bot traffic but it can help you identify it. Here is how to do it:

1. Look for Traffic Spikes

If your analytics show an instant spike in traffic for any given day without you taking any initiative for a traffic increase, it is bot traffic.

Here is an example:

Without bots meddling with your data, your traffic will increase gradually over time. But when you see a sudden spike, you need to further analyze the traffic on that given day to identify bot traffic.

2. Look for the Right Metrics in Your Analytics

When identifying bot traffic, the three most crucial metrics that you must inspect include bounce rate, session duration, and the number of sessions per user.

Here is how to identify bot traffic using key metrics in your analytics tool:

1. Bot traffic has a high bounce rate
2. Traffic from bots isn’t distributed rather all the visits generate simultaneously within a few minutes
3. Bot traffic has a low average session duration as its purpose isn’t to spend time on your website. It comes and leaves instantly
4. Bots don’t click on links, especially internal links. Their entry and exit page are the same and thus the number of sessions per user will be 1
5. Pages per session will be one too as they don’t move to other pages
6. All the users appear to be new.

Here is an example of how bot traffic looks like in Google Analytics:

All the bots visited the website between 8 and 10 am, they showed a 100% bounce rate and zero average session duration. This is evident that the traffic was generated by bots.

3. Analyze the Traffic Source

Bot traffic is usually direct. This is because bots don’t find your website in search engines and they rarely originate from a referral. However, bots can hit your website via a referral traffic source – but that’s rare.

Once you have analyzed the key metrics, head to the traffic source to see where all those new users came from:

Out of 56, 51 users aren’t human and these 51 users were nothing but bots.

4. Look at Location and Language

If your website receives traffic from a country or region you aren’t targeting, it could be a sign that bots visited your website. For example, if you offer plumbing services in a small area in Austin Texas, and analytics show that you are receiving traffic from Germany – that’s bot traffic.

Similarly, if you are targeting a specific country and you are using country-code TLD and you start getting traffic from another country that you aren’t targeting means you are getting bot traffic.

The same is the case with language.

If your website is in your local language, the bot traffic can be identified by looking at the language. If the users have any other language than your website’s language, it is a clear sign you are receiving bot traffic that needs to be excluded.

5. Analyze Your Server Performance

A degraded server performance with a spike in traffic during those hours is another way to identify bot traffic. Bots hit your website for a short period of time and this slows your server as it gets hard for it to handle such a high volume of traffic in a short period of time.

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is usually used to exhaust your website’s resources and crash or even shut down your server by sending heaps of bot traffic. If you ever experience such an issue, you should definitely search for bot activity.

6. Search for Suspicious IP Addresses

Tracing IPs that send a lot of traffic in a short period of time to your website is one of the best ways to identify bot traffic. If a single IP address sends a lot of traffic, you need to block it so that visits from the IP aren’t tracked by your analytics tool.

Excluding IP addresses to safeguard your website from bot traffic is the best way as IP address is the basic constituent of bots.

7. Watch Out for Poor Conversions

If all else fails, consider your website’s conversion rate.

If you notice that you are receiving a lot of traffic but the conversion rate is extremely low, you need to dig further as it is an indication that you are getting bot traffic.

Bots don’t convert. They just visit your website and leave. If your conversions sink instantly coupled with a spike in traffic, this is another indication of bot traffic.

Also, your conversion rate increases or decreases gradually as you incorporate CRO techniques across your website. It doesn’t fluctuate overnight. Monitor conversions and look for a sudden plunge.

Set Up IP Exclusions

If you spot a click fraud caused by the traffic bot your best chance at stopping it for the moment is excluding its IP address.

By making Google not to display your ad to that address, traffic bot should be unable to reach it, and therefore click fraud can be stopped.

This is a fast, effective but definitely not long-term solution for stopping the traffic bot as you will be required to monitor your campaigns constantly in order to stop the traffic bot once it starts acting.

Setting it up is super simple:

1. Open your Google Adwords and go to the settings tab
2. Click on the campaign you want to exclude IP address from
3. In Advanced settings you will find IP exclusions option where you will just paste the fraudulent IP and Save settings.

Run retargeting campaigns

Running retargeting campaign may decrease the probability of your ads being suffocated with traffic bot. Basically, a retargeting campaign will make your ads pop only to people who visited your website in the past.

Bear in mind that the price of these ads is usually higher, but it’s definitely a safer way to advertise instead of just getting your campaign out there.

Use reCAPTCHA

If you’re advertising for leads and offering download forms or sign-up options it is good to have reCAPTCHA on it.

Add reCAPTCHA to your website and it will protect you from certain types of traffic bots.

Setting it up is fairly simple and you can follow this guide by Google.

Exclude specific countries/regions

Let’s say, for example, that you already blocked 3 IP addresses that are from a certain country or region.

The next logical step is instead of constantly blocking various IPs, you exclude the region where your Google Ads campaign will be displayed.

That way, if the traffic bot has common IP from a certain country, it won’t be able to act.

Note, however, that this isn’t a solution if the traffic bot has the IP from the country you’re actually targeting.

How To Stop Traffic Bots Effectively

Bearing in mind that the estimated costs related to digital advertising fraud worldwide are growing exponentially, and set to reach as much 100 million dollars in 2023, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your clicks has become more important than ever before.

However, in order to effectively combat click fraud, relying solely on competitor blocking or exclusive publishing is not sufficient. To truly protect your ad campaigns, it’s important to continually monitor clicks and their locations. However, this auditing process can be time-consuming and prone to missed details.

Ultimately, the best way to stop click fraud is using Click Fraud Protection Software – and ClickGUARD’s automated click fraud blocking system is precisely what every data-driven marketer needs. By essentially acting as a firewall that shields your ads, ClickGUARD protects ads from fraudulent clicks and wasteful traffic by analyzing and assessing each click based on IP address, location, device, and more.

Our solution doesn’t just protect you from traffic bots, but it also protects you from:

• Competitor clicks
• Click farm networks
• Anonymous proxy clicks
• Rogue web crawlers

…And many other things click fraudsters use to decrease the efficiency of your Google Ads campaigns.

Our latest version also comes with many new and exciting features, such as Facebook Ads support, fully automated capabilities, a new and more intuitive user experience, value-focused pricing adjustments and account auto-upgrading, improved multi-account support, and improved reporting tools.

Get Protected from Click Fraud Today

FAQ

To help you create effective and profitable campaigns that reach your audience and drive sales, let’s take a look at how Shopping Ads work, their benefits, and how to set up a campaign using today’s best practices. So, let’s dive in!

How do Shopping Ads work?

Shopping ads work differently from traditional Search Ads as they use the product data that you submit through Google’s Merchant Center to determine which ads to show to users. This means that instead of targeting keywords, Shopping ads rely on the information you provide about your products, such as their attributes, prices, and availability. Google’s algorithms then match this data with a user’s search query and show the most relevant products in the ad.

You can create Standard Shopping or Performance Max campaigns that allow you to organize and promote your product inventory within Google Ads, giving you greater control over how your products are advertised. With Standard Shopping campaigns, you can also create product groups based on specific attributes, such as brand or category, and set bids for each group. Performance Max campaigns, on the other hand, use your advertising goals and product feed data to optimize your ad performance across Google’s channels.

Where Shopping Ads can appear

Standard Shopping Ads are designed to appear in selected Google Ads channels such as the Shopping tab, Google Search Ads (separate from Search text ads), Google Images, Google Search Partner websites, and Maps via Local Inventory Ads. On the other hand, Performance Max campaigns give advertisers access to the same Google Ads channels as Standard Shopping Ads – but with the addition of the Google Search text ads, Google Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery.

Benefits of Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping Ads provide a range of benefits over traditional product advertising. Let’s take a closer look what advantages they give over traditional forms of retail advertising:

1. Better qualified leads: By featuring product information directly in ads, Shopping Ads help users make more informed purchase decisions. This leads to better-qualified leads who are more likely to complete a purchase. For example, users can quickly see the product image and price in the ad, which puts them further down the purchasing funnel compared to other types of ads.
2. Easy retail-centric campaign management: Shopping Ads use the product attributes defined in the Merchant Center data feed, rather than keywords, to show relevant ads. This saves marketers a lot of time and effort as its algorithms automatically pull data from your store, craft ads for your products, and match them with relevant search queries. Although it may take more time to set up initially, it requires less ongoing effort afterward, making it a good starting point for any retailer.
3. More visible: Compared to traditional text-based ads, Shopping Ads get a premium spot on search result pages. They also display product images, prices, and other key information directly in the search results. This makes it a lot easier for shoppers to quickly evaluate products and compare prices, which leads to a higher click-through rate and ultimately more sales for retailers. More than one ad can also appear for a single user search, potentially doubling the reach of a single search.
4. Powerful reporting and competitive data: With detailed reporting tools, merchants can track the performance of their products and gain insights into the competitive landscape. Benchmarking data, impression share data, and the Bid Simulator tool can all help identify growth opportunities and optimize campaigns for better performance.
5. Access to new inventory: Performance Max campaigns, which are a new goal-based campaign from Google, provide access to new inventory and automation insights across all Google channels and networks. This can help unlock new audiences and drive even better performance for merchants looking to promote their products.

Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max is a goal-oriented campaign type that leverages inputs like your budget and product feed to optimize performance in real-time based on your conversion goals. It also complements keyword-based Search campaigns and allows advertisers to access their Google Ads inventory across all of Google’s advertising channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps – all from a single campaign.  With Performance Max, advertisers can achieve their specific conversion goals by optimizing their campaigns in real-time across multiple channels using Google’s Smart Bidding technology. Moreover, Performance Max empowers advertisers with a range of automation technologies, such as bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, and attribution, to help them get the most out of their advertising campaigns.

Standard Shopping Ads vs Performance Max Campaigns

As a retailer, you have the option to utilize Performance Max campaigns with a Google Merchant Center feed or Standard Shopping campaigns. Standard Shopping campaigns allow retailers to advertise their products on Google’s Shopping tab and other search results pages, targeting customers who are actively searching for the products they sell.

Performance Max campaigns offer a significant advantage over standard Shopping Ads as they provide advertisers with a more comprehensive approach to reaching customers across multiple channels. Advertisers can automatically access new inventory and formats as they become available, without having to set up any new campaigns. This feature enables advertisers to stay ahead of the curve by tapping into new advertising opportunities without any additional effort.

Performance Max campaigns also use machine learning to automatically optimize targeting and bidding based on the advertiser’s goals, while Standard Shopping campaigns require manual bid adjustments and product group optimizations. Overall, while both campaign types aim to drive sales and traffic for retailers, Performance Max campaigns offer a more comprehensive and automated approach to advertising.

Benefits of Performance Max campaigns:

Performance Max campaigns provide numerous benefits that can help businesses to achieve their advertising goals, such as:

• Customized goals: Businesses can find more converting customers by customizing the goals that matter to their business and maximizing conversions or conversion value. Performance Max allows businesses to engage customers across Google’s channels, using audience signals to unlock new customer segments they may not have expected.
• Data-driven attribution: Performance Max can drive more value by using data-driven attribution across channels to optimize for the most incremental touchpoints that drive customers to conversion. Machine learning models are used to make more accurate predictions about which ads, audiences, and creative combinations perform best for businesses, resulting in better performance and more value for their advertising budget.
• Rich insights: Performance Max campaigns provide rich insights that can help businesses to understand which creatives are impacting performance and optimize campaign creatives to drive ROI. Performance Max asset reporting can help businesses to gain insights into the performance of their ad creatives. Additionally, new insights such as rising search trends can help businesses to understand changes in performance and inform their broader business strategy.

Note: Most Smart Shopping and Local campaigns have already been upgraded to Performance Max in 2022. Performance Max now offers all the essential features found in Smart Shopping and Local campaigns while also providing access to new inventory and ad formats – and automation insights. Accounts with upgraded campaigns can no longer create new Smart Shopping campaigns.

How to create a Shopping Ads campaign

Google has made it easy for advertisers to set up campaigns for their products, thanks to its user-friendly interface and step-by-step instructions. Creating a Shopping Ads campaign therefore takes only a few minutes and can be done by anyone – regardless of their technical expertise. Here’s how.

1. Log in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click on Campaigns in the page menu on the left.
3. Click on the plus button and select New campaign.
4. Choose an objective for your campaign. Based on your objective, you can either “Add goal” or use the account-default goal.
5. Select Shopping as your campaign type. You can either create a Performance Max campaign or proceed with your Shopping campaign.
6. Choose the Merchant Center account that contains the products you want to advertise. If you don’t view any accounts here, you’ll need to link your Merchant Center and Google Ads account first. Note that you can’t change the merchant after you’ve created the campaign. Learn how to Link Merchant Center and Google Ads.
7. (Optional) Select feeds that contain the products you want to advertise in this campaign: Here you have two options: selecting feeds by feed label or selecting feeds by country of sale. If you choose to select feeds by feed label, the label you choose will determine which feeds from the selected Merchant Center account can be advertised in the campaign. On the other hand, if you choose to select feeds by country of sale, you need to select the country where your products will be sold and shipped to, and the ads will only be shown to people from that country.
8. Choose your advertising preferences: Enter a campaign name and adjust additional settings, such as inventory filters, local products, campaign URL options, bidding type, daily budget, campaign priority, networks, devices, and locations. You can change most of these settings after the campaign has been created.
9. Save your changes by clicking on the “Save and continue” button.
10. Create your first ad group and give your ad group a name for easier identification. This can be changed later.
11. Enter a bid for the ad group: This bid will apply to the first product group “All products” and can be modified after the campaign has been set up. The ad group will consist of individual product ads that will be automatically generated using information from your Merchant Center account.
12. After filling in the necessary details, click on the “Save” button.
13. Once you’ve saved your ad group, you’ll be directed to the product groups page where you’ll see the “All products” group which contains all the products in the campaign. You can create more product groups and use subdivisions to make bidding more specific.

Best practices for Shopping Ads

Here’s how you can optimize your Shopping ads campaigns to get more sales out of every click.

1. Make your products stand out

To make Shopping ads more visually appealing to customers, you should always try to use high-quality, product-first visuals with close-up product shots and white backgrounds. These visuals make it easier for customers to see product details and can lead to increased engagement. Additionally, it is crucial to ensure that product data is accurate and up-to-date, including rich product descriptions, product prices, and availability. Annotations can also be used to stand out to customers looking for convenient ways to purchase products.

Including a video asset that is at least ten seconds long can also help show the business in action.  Businesses can also drive foot traffic to their store by setting store goals within Performance Max campaigns, promoting physical locations across Google, and maximizing in-store value by utilizing store visits, call clicks, and/or direction clicks.

Pro tip: Customer Match can help you reach out to existing customers and find new ones across various Google platforms. By using the information your existing customers have shared with you, it will target those customers as well as new ones like them. It also does this in a privacy-safe way, which is important given the shift away from cookie-based remarketing. Also, when using Smart Bidding and optimized targeting, Customer Match lists are automatically enabled to enhance the performance of your ad campaigns.

2. Optimize campaigns for maximum performance

Once your Shopping campaigns are up and running, it’s important to regularly assess its performance to ensure that you achieve your desired outcomes. You can keep track of your campaign’s performance by checking several key areas within Google Ads:

• The Product Groups page: The Product groups page is the first place to check the performance of your product groups. You can view information like max. CPC, impressions, CTR, conversion metrics, benchmark CTR and CPC, impression share, click share, and more. You can also download reports and add segments to view your performance by days of the week, click type, or device
• The Products page: Monitoring product insights in the Products page of Google Ads can help your understand individual product performance within their campaign and resolve potential issues that may impact reach. Insights can be used to spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes, and compare bidding strategies to top competitors.
• The Predefined reports page: This page allows for customized performance reporting with any dimension you choose, including category, product type, and brand. You can also segment performance data at the campaign or ad group level to compare traffic from the Google Search Network and Google search partners.
• The Auction Insights report: This report evaluates how your Shopping ad campaigns are performing in comparison to other advertisers participating in the same auctions. These insights guide you in making strategic decisions regarding your bidding and budgeting choices.
• The Bid Simulator: If you’re unsure how adjusting your bids could impact your performance, the Bid Simulator can provide valuable insights. It estimates the potential advertising results over the past seven days if you had set different bids, helping you understand how different product group bids may affect your traffic and conversions.

Pro tip: The quality and accuracy of your ad’s performance are heavily reliant on the product data that you have uploaded in Merchant Center. It is therefore crucial to ensure that your product data is up-to-date and precise to ensure the best results for your ad campaigns.

3. Use recommendations

Recommendations are a feature in Google Ads that identifies opportunities to improve account performance based on real-time data. It is important to review recommendations regularly, prioritize those that align with your business goals and have the biggest impact on performance. You can also dismiss recommendations that do not align with your goals and provide a reason to help Google Ads improve your recommendations in the future.

Keep your Shopping Ads Protected

As a retailer using Google Shopping Ads, it’s important to understand what click fraud is and how it can affect your advertising campaigns. Click fraud occurs when an individual or a group of individuals intentionally click on your ads with no real interest in your products or services.

These clicks can come from competitors trying to exhaust your advertising budget, bots or automated programs simulating human clicks, or even from individuals or groups hired specifically to generate fake clicks on your ads. Click fraud can quickly deplete your advertising budget, reduce your ROI, and ultimately harm your business by wasting your time and resources on wasteful traffic.

ClickGUARD, a leading fraud detection and prevention software, can help you eliminate unwanted clicks on your PPC ads and save your ad budget for real, legitimate clicks. Our latest version comes with many new and exciting features, such as Facebook Ads support, fully automated capabilities, a new and more intuitive user experience, value-focused pricing adjustments and account auto-upgrading, improved multi-account support, and improved reporting tools.  Start maximizing your ROI and protect your ad budget today with ClickGUARD!

FAQ

As a marketer, it’s crucial to stay informed about the various types of PPC fraud that exist and take proactive measures to protect your advertising campaigns. In this article, we’ll explore some of the lesser-known types of PPC fraud that marketers may not be aware of and provide practical tips on how to detect and prevent them.

What is PPC fraud?

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) fraud is a serious concern for businesses that rely on digital advertising to drive traffic and sales. It’s a broad term that encompasses various fraudulent activities aimed at cheating businesses out of their PPC advertising budget.

Click fraud is the most prevalent type of PPC fraud, which involves generating invalid clicks on PPC ads through bots, automated software, or human intervention with the intention of damaging competitor ad budgets or increasing publisher profits.

PPC fraud can also involve fake clicks from publishers who earn revenue for each click on their ads. In such cases, publishers can manipulate click data or engage in other shady practices to inflate click counts and generate more revenue from advertisers. In other instances, competitors may engage in click fraud to harm rival businesses by running up their advertising costs.

One of the main reasons click fraud is such a growing concern for businesses is that it can be carried out on a large scale through click farms. These click farms often employ vulnerable and low-paid workers in developing countries who are paid to repeatedly click on ads or social media posts – with the aim of either boosting the publisher’s profits or harming competitor ad budgets.

What are the effects of click fraud on businesses?

It’s important for businesses to understand the potential consequences of click fraud to take necessary measures to prevent it. Here are some of the main ways click fraud can harm your business:

1. Click fraud distorts ad campaign metrics

When fraudulent clicks are mixed in with legitimate clicks, it becomes challenging to determine the actual effectiveness of campaigns. As a result, businesses may be misled into thinking that their campaigns are performing well, when in reality, they are wasting valuable advertising dollars.

2. Click fraud leads to low return on advertising spend (ROAS)

Since fraudulent clicks do not result in conversions or sales, the cost per conversion can increase dramatically. This can lead to a situation where businesses are spending more money on advertising than they are generating in revenue, resulting in a negative return on investment (ROI).

3. Click fraud wastes internal time and effort of teams

When teams are focused on investigating and resolving click fraud issues, they may be neglecting other essential aspects of their job, such as optimizing campaigns or developing new marketing strategies. By causing teams to chase non-revenue generating activities, click fraud ultimately has a significant impact on a company’s productivity and profitability.

Top Types of PPC Fraud

Being aware of these fraudulent practices is essential for any business that wants to protect their ad budget and ensure that their advertising efforts are effective. In this section, we will delve into the most common types of PPC fraud, how they work, and the potential impact they can have on businesses.

Click Spam

Click spam is a deceptive technique used by fraudsters to falsely accumulate clicks on mobile ads. Unlike other types of click fraud, click spamming can be challenging to detect as it attributes fake clicks to real users. Essentially, when a user unknowingly opens a web page or app operated by a fraudster, hitbots or clickbots start automatically clicking on ads that the user may not even see.

By simulating genuine user clicks, click spamming enables digital fraudsters to accumulate fake engagement on ads and receive a payout. Moreover, click spamming can be used to sabotage competitors by inflating engagement on their ads and distorting ad campaign metrics. This makes it challenging for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and optimize their Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS).

A notable example of click spamming is the DrainerBot operation. DrainerBot was a massive mobile ad fraud operation that affected millions of Android users, causing harm to both advertisers and consumers. The bot used infected code to download invisible video ads on Android devices and clicked on ads without user consent, draining battery life and consuming excessive amounts of data. Oracle reported that the infected apps resulted in smartphone owners incurring hundreds of dollars in overage charges.

How to avoid click spam: businesses can take certain precautions such as using ad fraud detection software and monitoring their ad campaigns regularly. It’s also important to work with trusted partners, including ad networks and publishers, who have measures in place to prevent click fraud. Additionally, businesses can implement ad verification tools that allow them to check the validity of clicks and impressions.

Ad injection

Ad injection fraud usually involves the use of adware, which is software that injects ads onto webpages without the owner’s knowledge or permission. This adware can be intentionally downloaded, or it can come bundled with other software or applications that users unknowingly install on their computers or mobile devices.

Once the adware is installed, it starts to inject ads onto webpages, disrupting the user’s browsing experience and replacing legitimate ads with fake ones. Ad injection fraudsters often use deceptive techniques such as overlaying ads on top of existing ones, or making ads appear as if they are part of the website’s content.

For advertisers, ad injection can be particularly harmful as their ads may be placed on low-quality websites or even sites that are completely unrelated to their business. This can not only lead to a decrease in ad performance, lower click-through rates, and wasted ad spend – it can also cause significant distrust among potential customers and damage to an advertisers reputation.

How to avoid ad injection: It’s important to be cautious when downloading and installing software, especially from third-party sources. Stick to trusted sources like the official app store for your device or the official website of the software provider. It’s also a good idea to keep your anti-virus and anti-malware software up to date and perform regular scans to detect and remove any ad injection software that may have slipped through. Additionally, you can install ad blockers or browser extensions that specifically target and block ad injection.

PPC Phishing

Email phishing attacks are nothing new – but you may not be aware of this PPC-specific technique being used.

Search Engine Watch reported on a phishing scam hijacking URLs of well known financial and banking companies. The scam uses these companies’ paid search campaigns to send users to a malware phishing site. Users are likely to click on the ads because they trust the brand, and fraudsters piggyback off that credibility to surreptitiously send the user to a fake website that lures personal information (like login details) out of them.

This type of fraud is particularly insidious because users are more likely to click on the ads as they trust the brand. By leveraging the credibility of these trusted brands, fraudsters can surreptitiously send users to a fake website designed to extract personal information, such as login details.

These phishing scams can have devastating effects on customers who fall prey to them: personal and financial information can be compromised, leading to identity theft, fraudulent purchases, and other malicious activities. Additionally, these scams can be a significant threat to the reputation of well-known brands, as customers may lose trust in them if they feel that their security has been compromised.

How to avoid PPC phishing: Businesses need to be vigilant about the types of ads that appear under their brand name. It’s essential to monitor ad campaigns and regularly review ad performance data to identify suspicious activity. It’s also crucial to educate users about the dangers of phishing scams and provide guidance on how to identify and avoid them. By taking these precautions, businesses can help protect themselves and their customers from the damaging effects of PPC phishing.

Viewbotting

Viewbotting is a fraudulent way of gaining exposure and viewers in the live streaming community by using bots. This method uses illegitimate scripts to manipulate the view count and push a stream to the top of the popularity rankings to attract more viewers, subscribers, and revenue. And to make the fake views seem more real, viewbotting sometimes uses chatbots to mimic viewer interaction. However, viewbotting is not only harmful to other streamers – it also affects digital advertisers.

Since the Twitch Partner Program enables streamers to earn revenue from ads displayed on their channel, viewbotting is essentially a form of stealing ad spend from digital advertisers. Streamers who use viewbotting services can play ads on their channel while they live stream and make a commission off the revenue that advertisers pay to Twitch. However, if the streamer is using viewbotting services, those ads aren’t being seen by real people, and advertisers are essentially wasting their money on bot views.

How to avoid viewbotting: Twitch has developed detection systems and uses a combination of machine learning and human review to investigate and take action against fraudulent accounts. Streamers should also prioritize organic growth and engagement to ensure the integrity of the live streaming community and protect the interests of advertisers.

Fake Streaming

Fake streaming, also known as stream fraud, is a type of digital fraud that primarily affects music streaming platforms like Spotify. The fraudsters use bots to artificially inflate the number of play counts on a song, giving the impression that it’s more popular than it actually is. By doing this, they earn fraudulent royalties that should have gone to genuine artists who use the platform honestly.

Fake Spotify streaming also affects advertisers who are paying for ad time, thinking that their ads are being heard by real people, but in reality, the bots are listening to them. This means that advertisers are essentially wasting their money on fake plays. Moreover, brands that partner with artists based on their supposed popularity and reach are also victims of this type of fraud.

How to avoid Fake Streaming: Although Spotify is taking measures to combat stream fraud, it remains a significant problem since fraudsters are constantly finding new ways to bypass the platform’s anti-fraud measures. This underscores the importance of advertisers, artists, and streaming platforms staying vigilant to protect against this type of digital fraud.

How about a Few Success Stories?

It’s not all doom and deception out there. The good news is that companies are striking back against digital fraudsters – and winning.

In 2016 Twitch filed a lawsuit against several “botmakers” offering viewbotting services to Twitch users. The defendants, a team of seven, were ordered to pay nearly $1.4 million to Twitch in damages for trademark infringement, breach of contract, unfair competition and violation of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. This was a major win in the fight against viewbotting.

Another remarkable success story comes from the takedown of individuals involved in the infamous Methbot/3ve ad fraud operation. Methbot was an international cybercriminal ring traced to Russia and operating out of data centers in the U.S. and Netherlands making between $3 million and $5 million per day using bots to target the video advertising industry and fraudulently rake in ad revenue.

An investigation by the FBI, with help from other companies, led to the arrest of several ringleaders including Aleksandr Zhukov.

Zhukov was apprehended in Bulgaria, and several other cybercriminals involved in the ad-fraud ring were arrested in Malaysia and Estonia. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the charges against them include wire fraud, computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. But what these takedowns really demonstrated was that law enforcement and companies can work together to bring down digital fraudsters – and make the online world a more trustworthy place for everyone.

So what can you do?

As an online marketer or entrepreneur, it is crucial to be aware of the various types of PPC fraud and know how to protect your business from it. One of the surest ways to protect yourself is by using click fraud detection and prevention software designed specifically to combat PPC fraud.

ClickGUARD offers a powerful solution for safeguarding your PPC campaigns against click fraud: by acting as a firewall that shields your Google and Meta Ads, it identifies and neutralizes the impact of fraudulent activity and enables you to truly maximize the effectiveness of your advertising budget.

Our latest version comes equipped with fully automated features, improved reporting, and a more intuitive user experience, making it accessible to any business or marketer looking to keep their search ad campaigns protected.

With a free trial available for everyone, there’s no reason not to try ClickGUARD and see the results for yourself.

[Get protected today]

FAQ

Picture this: you’re scrolling through Google searching for a new pair of shoes from a local retailer – and an ad catches your eye. It’s from a brand you’ve never heard of, but it offers affordable yet stylish footwear that matches your exact needs and taste. And to top it off, they’re offering delivery and a discount that you just can’t pass up. This is the power of Search Ads in action.

However, with a high volume of search results, it can be challenging for businesses to stand out from the crowd. That’s why it’s essential to understand how Search Ads work and how to best utilize them. In this guide, we will be taking a deep dive into the key benefits of Google Search Ads, the different ad types available, and today’s best strategies for creating Search Ad campaigns that will drive real conversions.

What are the benefits of Search Ads?

1. Intent-based marketing

Search Ads are particularly useful for advertisers as they offer a way to target potential customers who are actively searching Google for products or services related to their business. This is known as intent-based marketing. By bidding on specific keywords or search terms, advertisers can ensure that their ads are shown to relevant audiences, increasing the chances of clicks and conversions.

2. You choose your objective

Search Ads offer a range of other objectives beyond getting traffic to your website. These objectives include generating leads, sales, phone calls, and even in-person visits. Depending on your business model, you can choose the objective that aligns best with your goals and allocate your budget accordingly.

3. Target your exact audience

Another significant advantage of paid Search Ads is their ability to target your ideal audience. Unlike traditional advertising, which aims to reach as many people as possible, Search Ads allow for more fine-tuned targeting. You can target potential customers based on demographics, interests, purchase intent, website signals, and remarketing data, among other factors. This level of precision enables you to reach the most relevant audience possible, thereby maximizing your chances of converting them into paying customers.

4. Extensive reach

Google Search Ads have the unique ability to appear across a diverse range of platforms and websites within the Google Search Network. Advertisers can choose to display their ads at the top, bottom, or next to the search results on Google’s search engine, as well as on Google Play, Google Maps, and the Shopping tab on Google. In addition to these channels, Google Search Ads also have the potential to reach millions of potential customers through Google’s extensive network of search partners, which includes thousands of other websites. With such widespread visibility, Google Search Ads provide advertisers with unparalleled opportunities to target their ideal audience and drive conversions.

5. Flexible budget options

Finally, with flexible budget options, Search Ads offer a level of scalability that is difficult to achieve with other advertising channels. As your business grows, you can increase your budget to reach more potential customers and drive more conversions. And if you need to tighten your budget for any reason, you can adjust your spending accordingly without having to commit to a long-term advertising contract. You can also track key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions to see exactly how your budget is being spent and what kind of return you’re getting on your investment.

Types of Search Ads

Now that we’ve discussed the key benefits of Search Ads in general, let’s take a closer look at the unique types of Search Ads advertisers can choose from, and what marketing goals they are ideal for:

Text ads

Text ads are the most common type of Google search ad. They appear as simple, text-based ads above or below the search results. Advertisers can include a headline, a description, and a display URL. Text ads are highly customizable, so advertisers can tailor their messaging to their target audience. They can also include ad extensions like call buttons, location information, and more to enhance their ad’s visibility and provide additional value to potential customers.

Important note: As of June 30, 2022, advertisers are not be able to create or edit expanded text ads. However, existing expanded text ads will continue to serve, and advertisers can pause, resume, or remove them as needed. Google recommends transitioning to responsive Search Ads, which allow for more flexibility and better ad performance.

• Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads are a newer type of ad that allows advertisers to provide multiple headlines and descriptions. Google then mixes and matches these components to create different ad variations, testing different combinations to see which ones perform best. Responsive Search Ads are a great option for advertisers who want to save time on ad creation and testing, as well as those who want to maximize their ad’s potential by testing different messages and variations.

• Call-only Search Ads

Call-only ads are designed to encourage phone calls from potential customers. They appear on mobile devices and only feature a phone number and a call button. These ads are a great option for businesses that rely heavily on phone calls, such as service providers, as they can generate leads and conversions directly from the ad.

• Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads automatically generate ads based on the content of a website. Advertisers provide a list of landing pages on their site, and Google creates ads that match search queries with relevant content from those pages. Dynamic Search Ads are a great option for businesses with large and constantly changing inventories or for those who want to save time on ad creation and testing.

• Shopping Ads

Shopping Ads are a type of search ad that includes product information such as an image, price, and product name within the user’s search result. These ads are designed for e-commerce retailers and can appear on the Google Shopping tab, as well as alongside all other Google search results. These ads can be highly effective for driving conversions and sales as they allow potential customers to see products and prices upfront and make an informed purchase decision immediately.

Best strategies for Search Ads

Creating truly effective Search Ads requires careful planning and attention to detail. After setting up your Search Ads campaign (which you can find detailed instructions for here), the following strategies will help make them more effective:

1. Choose your words wisely

The truth is simple: ads that closely match a user’s search query – and grab their attention with compelling copy – are more likely to generate engagement from them. That is why it is crucial to deliver the right messaging for the right search query. Advertisers should always craft messaging that focuses on user benefits, avoid generic language, use specific calls to action, and ensure their headline and description’s messaging aligns with their choice of keywords.

Your headline is the first thing people see when they encounter a Search Ad, so using a strong headline is vital. And by trying out different unique headlines and descriptions, such as headlines of varying lengths, you allow Google’s ad platform to assemble more ad combinations when displaying your ads.

Pro tip: If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands (like most marketers), remember that you can use Dynamic Search Ads to automatically generate headlines for you. Dynamic Search Ads are an excellent option for advertisers who have a sizeable inventory or a well-established website. The headlines and landing pages for Dynamic Search Ads are generated using your website’s content, ensuring that your ads remain relevant and saving you time in the process. Simply add a creative description and you’re good to go.

2. Bid the smart way

Smart Bidding is a very powerful tool that removes the burden of manually setting bids to meet your performance goals. Unlike Manual Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bidding, where you have to manually update bids for specific ad groups or keywords, Smart Bidding uses advanced machine learning to determine the best bid for every ad auction automatically. Smart Bidding also offers bid strategy reports that provide an in-depth analysis of your bidding performance, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of your bidding strategies. Here are the different types of bidding strategies (Smart Bidding) that you should know about:

• Target CPA (Cost-Per-Action) bidding is aimed purely at getting the highest number of conversions for an ad, and you can specify the average cost you want to pay for each conversion. When a user performs a search that matches an advertiser’s keywords, Google Ads uses the Target CPA to set a bid in real time based on the probability of conversion.
• Target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is designed to automatically optimize bids at auction time based on the likelihood of a search generating a high-value conversion. This means that if the bid strategy determines that a user search has a high probability of resulting in a valuable conversion, it will bid higher on that search. Conversely, if the search is deemed unlikely to generate a high-value conversion, the bid will be lower. This allows for tailored bids for each auction, and bids are automatically optimized to maximize Return on Investment (ROI).
• Maximize Conversions is a highly recommended bidding strategy as it automatically optimizes bids for your ad each time it’s eligible to appear. By analyzing historical campaign data and contextual signals at auction time, Maximize Conversions uses advanced machine learning to find the most cost-effective strategy that will lead to the highest number of conversions.
• Maximize Conversion Value **prioritizes generating the highest possible value of conversions for a given budget. This is different from Maximize Conversions, which focuses on achieving the highest possible number of conversions for a given budget – without taking into account the value of each conversion.

Important note: Setting up conversion tracking allows you to monitor user actions, such as sales, leads, phone calls, or website visits, after interacting with your ad. Conversion tracking is therefore vital in determining the effectiveness of your ads – and it is also a requirement to use Smart Bidding. Without conversion tracking, you can still use automated bidding with the maximize clicks strategy.

3. Target your ads effectively

Effective search ad targeting is crucial for businesses to reach their potential customers without spending their ad budget ineffectively. One common mistake advertisers make, for example, is targeting only a small city or a few keywords, which can greatly limit the reach of their ads. Conversely, targeting too large an area can lead to irrelevant traffic on their website. When it comes to targeting, advertisers can avoid such pitfalls by following these three best practices:

• Location targeting should be done based on where customers are – rather than just where the business is located. For instance, an e-commerce website should target all the locations where it ships its products, rather than just where the business is located. Advertisers can adjust their location targeting settings at any time to optimize their ad reach.
• Building a good keyword list is another crucial aspect of expanding targeting for Search Ads. Advertisers should invest time and effort in selecting relevant keywords that their customers might use to search for their products or services. Starting with the main categories of the business, advertisers can then use tools like Keyword Planner to expand their keyword list with related terms and product names.
• Creating separate ad groups for different products and categories can further improve the targeting of Search Ads. Ad groups should contain ads that are directly related to the keywords in that group. For instance, an online bicycle shop can create separate ad groups for children’s bikes, racing bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, helmets, and bike locks, with specific keywords related to each product in the respective ad groups.

4. Improve your ad with quality assets

Implementing assets such as images, site links, pricing, a phone number, or a lead form can make your Search Ads a lot more engaging and provide helpful information about your business. Always try to enable all the asset types that make sense for your business.

Pro tip: Google recommends adding at least four different asset types to your Search Ad campaigns to improve your ad quality and, as a result, the click-through rate.

5. Always check your Ad Strength

Google’s Ad Strength feature can provide valuable feedback on how well your ad follows Google’s best practices for optimal performance. Improving your Search Ads until they fall within the Good or Excellent Ad Strength group can be a big difference-maker. In fact, Search Ads that have an Excellent Ad Strength rating receive an average of 9% more clicks and conversions compared to those with a Poor rating.

To improve Ad Strength, here are some common call-to-action recommendations:

• Maximize the number of ad combinations by adding more headlines and descriptions. The ad creation process provides asset suggestions to help you write high-performing headlines and descriptions, which you can accept, edit, or use as inspiration.
• Make your headlines and descriptions unique and describe what you are selling, along with your unique selling points to appeal to different customers. Avoid using repetitive words or phrases to generate more combinations.
• Reduce pinning to show more combinations of headlines and descriptions. If you must use pinning, consider having multiple unique assets pinned to the same position.
• Improve your ad’s relevance by including keywords from your ad group’s popular keywords in your headlines and descriptions.

Pro tip: You can use keyword insertion to automatically update your ads with the keywords in your ad group, which will keep your ads relevant to exactly what users are searching for.

6. Never stop optimizing

Getting great results from an effective Search Ad campaign doesn’t mean you should stop there. Testing and optimizing creative messages are essential for continually improving Search Ad performance. Trying out different ad variations can be used to test and iterate creative messages, and success should be evaluated based on incremental impressions, clicks, and conversions.

A great analytics tool worth mentioning is Google’s Report Editor. It allows you to interact with your data by creating multi-dimensional tables and charts. Using a drag-and-drop interface, you can build and modify these tables and charts. You can also use multi-segment analysis to separate your data with greater precision, and custom charts to visualize trends and patterns in your data. Additionally, the tool offers advanced filtering and sorting features that allow you to filter segmented metrics and sort them by multiple columns.

Pro tip: The traditional last-click approach for measuring online advertising success overlooks other customer interactions with ads. Attribution models can give you more control over how much credit each ad interaction gets for your conversions. As a result, you can reach customers earlier in their purchase cycle and gain a more holistic understanding of your customer’s click journey.

Keep your search ad campaigns protected

As pervasive and powerful as Google Search Ads may be, they are still not immune to wasteful or fraudulent traffic. Click fraud refers to clicks on ads with malicious intent. This can come from intentional clicks on your ads by competitors, publishers artificially inflating click revenue, or clicks generated by bots. In 2021, more than 42% of all web traffic worldwide was generated by bots – and this is a growing problem every advertiser needs to address.

Thankfully, there are measures businesses can take to safeguard themselves and their ad campaigns from click fraud – and ClickGUARD is the perfect solution. ClickGUARD is a leading Google Ads click fraud protection and prevention software that can detect and prevent illegitimate clicks or wasteful traffic. By essentially acting as a firewall, it identifies and negates the impact of fraudulent activity on your ad campaigns, allowing you to maximize the effectiveness of your advertising budget.

Our latest version comes with fully automated features, improved reporting, a more intuitive user experience, and Facebook Ad protection, making it accessible to any business or marketer looking to keep their search ad campaigns protected.

With a free trial available for everyone, there’s no reason not to give ClickGUARD a try and see the results for yourself.

FAQ

With 2.9 billion monthly active users worldwide – nearly 30% of the global population – Facebook still captivates one of the world’s largest audiences. It has grown over the years from a small social website for Harvard university students into a multi-billion dollar platform that allows users to connect with others, share photos and videos, join groups and communities, and – more importantly – promote their business.

And despite Facebook’s controversial founding history, the infamous 2010 Cambridge Analytica scandal, and various other scandals over the last decade, it still stands the test of time to remain the social media giant few other platforms can contend with. The number of Facebook users continues to grow – which is one of the many reasons why 90% of marketers are advertising on it.

From small startups to multinational corporations, businesses of all sizes can leverage Facebook’s advertising network (which includes Instagram and the Meta Audience Network) to drive growth and connect to their audiences on a more personal level. But what exactly are today’s best practices, useful features, and other benefits of using Facebook Ads that businesses should be aware of?

Whether it’s your primary form of marketing or just a portion of your overall strategy, here is what you should know about the benefits of using Facebook Ads for your business:

1. Facebook Ads are simple to set up – and scalable

One of the most compelling reasons for businesses to use Facebook Ads is the ease with which they can be set up. Facebook takes you through a step-by-step process where you select the type of ad, choose your target audience, and set your budget for a certain timeframe. The process is also highly customizable with a variety of ad formats, delivery, and bidding options available. From pay-per-click to pay-per-impression or pay-per-action, businesses can tailor their advertising approach to meet their specific needs.

All that you need to get started is to create a Facebook page or be given an advertisers role for an existing page. You can create ads from the page itself or use the ad creation tool. You can then use the Ads Manager or the Ads Manager mobile app to view your ads, make changes, and see results for each unique campaign you’ve created.

Once your ads are approved by Facebook and go live (which usually takes about 24 hours), your ad will start showing results almost immediately. And depending on your budget, it can reach thousands of people in just a few days.

Another great benefit of advertising on Facebook is that its ads are scalable across social media platforms such as Instagram, Messenger and the wider Meta Audience Network. This enables businesses to extend their reach beyond Facebook with little to no effort at all – and opens new ways to engage with audiences via Instagram, Instagram stories, mobile apps, and more.

2. Facebook’s targeting is unparalleled

Because Facebook owns the wealth of data of billions of users, its targeting capabilities can dig deeper than any other platform.  You can focus your marketing efforts on specific interests, behaviors, age groups, gender, job description, connections, locations, languages, and a lot more. You can combine and layer them to eliminate users who are not your target market, and it is even possible to target individuals who are fans of your competitors.

This level of granularity can be extremely useful as it allows you to create highly personalized ad campaigns that deliver relevant ads to the right people at the right time. Facebook’s targeting capabilities also include psychographic targeting, which allows advertisers to target users based on their interests, hobbies, spending habits, and behaviors. For example, advertisers can target users who are interested in fitness or who frequently travel. This level of targeting enables advertisers to create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with their exact target audience.

In addition to these targeting options, Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature enables businesses to attract people who share similar characteristics to their existing customers. A Lookalike Audience uses an existing custom audience of your choice for its source audience. When you create your Lookalike Audience, you can use a percentage range to customize the level of similarity you would like between your Lookalike Audience and your source audience. Typically, Lookalike Audiences that closely resemble their source audience are considered more advantageous.

Facebook’s retargeting feature is also great for reengaging with people who have previously interacted with your brand. By using Facebook’s Custom Audiences, you can utilize sources such as your own customer lists, website traffic, or engagement on different Meta platforms to retarget people who are already familiar with your business. Note that it is necessary to integrate the Meta pixel into your website in order to do this.

3. Robust analytics and insights

Facebook’s analytics and insights are a major selling point for advertisers who want to ensure they are making the most of their advertising budget. With powerful analytics tools you wouldn’t find on any other social media platforms, businesses of any size can gain detailed insights into their ad campaigns’ performance and make informed decisions about how to improve their results.

Facebook provides you with a wealth of metrics to track your business’s performance on the platform. You can easily access information about your weekly reach, post engagement, and page likes, as well as identify which of your posts are performing best. However, the insights provided by Facebook go beyond surface-level. You can also gain valuable data on clicks, conversions, and sales.

Facebook’s Breakdowns in Ads Manager feature provides detailed breakdowns of audience age, gender, location, device type, and more, as well as breakdowns for different ad types and user actions. Furthermore, Attribution Reports help businesses to measure the impact of their ads and identify the most important touchpoints that funnel across multiple publishers, channels, and devices.

And for fine-tuning ad campaigns, Facebook offers ad comparisons and split-testing options, such as A/B testing, which allows marketers to display nearly identical ads with minor differences to see which adjustments perform better over time.

Finally, Facebook’s ad forecasting and performance estimates are another invaluable tool for marketers who wish to plan ahead. Facebook can make estimates about how many people might be reached and how many conversions (or other results) might be gained per day with a full ad budget. This Estimated Daily Results feature is especially useful for brands that want to make fine adjustments during their ad campaigns.

Overall, Facebook’s robust analytics and insights give businesses access to powerful data that can help them greatly optimize their ad campaigns. With a wide range of tools available, including ad measurement, attribution reports, ad comparisons, split-testing options, and ad forecasting, businesses can make more informed decisions about their advertising strategy and improve their Return On Investment (ROI).

4. Facebook Ads are tailored to your goals

Whereas Google Ads are more tailored towards getting clicks and conversions, Facebook Ads are designed to meet to your specific business goals. Whether you want to increase engagement on a post, drive traffic to your website or generate leads for your business, the platform allows you to choose from a range of objectives that might best suit your advertising needs.

If you’re planning a Facebook ad campaign, it’s essential to choose the right objective to achieve your goals. Here are the various campaign objectives available on Facebook:

The customizable nature of Facebook Ads also enables you to create ads that reflect your brand and target audience. Facebook Ads offers a variety of ad types, including photo, video, stories, carousel ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, Messenger ads, and interactive playables. This flexibility in ad types and placements allows you to experiment with different formats and find out what works best for your business or resonate more with your target audience.

5. Facebook Ads are extremely cost-effective

Facebook Ads have become one of the most affordable advertising options out there.

Compared to traditional advertising channels such as radio, billboards, newsletters, or TV, Facebook advertising is much more affordable as it allows you to reach your target audience with a custom budget and measure your campaign’s results on the same day of launch – without the risk of wasting thousands of dollars on reaching irrelevant audiences. And because you have complete control over who sees your ads and regular insights about your campaign’s performance, you can run your ads without running the risk of overspending.

However, with the recent privacy changes brought about by iOS 14, the way advertisers are allowed to gather data and target audiences has changed drastically. This has had a significant impact on Facebook Ads, but it is worth noting that Facebook’s ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) has remained relatively stable. Brands also need to double their efforts to leverage their owned data to create Lookalike Audiences that target new users. Uploading up-to-date customer lists containing information such as names, emails, and phone numbers to Custom Audiences can help businesses navigate the new challenges of advertising post-iOS14 in a privacy-friendly way.

How to keep your Facebook Ad campaigns protected

With the rise of ad fraud and click fraud, it’s more important than ever for businesses to protect their ad campaigns from fraudulent activities. ClickGUARD is a leading fraud detection and prevention software that eliminates unwanted clicks on your PPC ads, cleans up your traffic, and saves your ad budget for real, legitimate clicks.

ClickGUARD now provides a support add-on specifically designed for Facebook Ads. With this new integration, you can experience all the benefits of ClickGUARD’s advanced protection and optimization tools – combined with the power of Facebook Ads. Our latest version also comes with many new and exciting features, such as fully automated capabilities, a new and more intuitive user experience, value-focused pricing adjustments and account auto-upgrading, improved multi-account support, and improved reporting tools.

So why wait? Protect your ad budget and maximize your ROI with ClickGUARD’s Facebook Ad protection today!

FAQ

Invalid and fraudulent clicks, in particular, have been a persistent problem for both advertisers and publishers using Google Ads and AdSense. These are clicks that are generated artificially rather than by genuine user interest, which can lead to inflated costs for advertisers and revenue losses for advertisers.

While Google has put in place measures to prevent invalid clicks, it is essential for advertisers and publishers to take proactive steps to protect their advertising investments.

In this article, we will guide you through how you can identify invalid clicks – both in Google Ads and AdSense – and share today’s best practices on how to prevent them from occurring in the first place. We will also explore the measures that Google has put in place to combat fraudulent activity.

First, let’s take a look at how to check for invalid clicks on Google Ads.

Invalid Clicks in Google Ads: What Are They and How to Stop Them

Invalid clicks and click fraud in Google Ads are a very real issue with a significant impact on digital advertisers. According to our research, 42% of all online traffic today is driven by bots and only 44% of impressions (or ads shown) across Google’s display advertising platforms are ever seen by a human.

Click fraud is more prevalent – and costly – than many of us realize. That is why is so important for advertisers to educate themselves about this issue and take precautionary measures to stop them from negatively impacting their ad campaigns.

So, what are invalid clicks?

Invalid clicks are any fraudulent activity that can affect your online advertising campaigns, particularly Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. Invalid clicks can also be harmless but wasteful traffic from clicks that are accidentally made by users, repeated clicks by the same user, or clicks from users with no real purchase intent.

On the other hand, there is also the more serious type of invalid clicks: click fraud. These are intentional clicks on your ads by competitors, publishers artificially inflating click revenue, or clicks generated by bots. Click fraud is therefore a far more malicious form of invalid clicks as it intentionally aims to exhaust your ad budget or manipulate your campaign’s performance data.

Ultimately, the big issue with this is that Google Ads are paid by clicks and impressions – so if a click doesn’t come from a real human who’s potentially interested in buying your product, it’s a wasted click.

Some of the more common causes of invalid traffic include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Clicks generated by publishers on the ads shown on their own sites (so that they can get better commissions)
• Accidental clicks on ads
• Intentional, repeated clicks performed by humans (usually in click farms, with the purpose of click fraud)
• Intentional, repeated clicks performed by bots and botnets with malicious intent

How Does Google Deal with Invalid Traffic?

Google has a few mechanisms in place that help them fight invalid traffic in Google AdSense

• Automatic Filters: Google has a system that checks for clicks coming from unusual IP addresses or from the same IP address multiple times. When these clicks are detected, they’re filtered out and aren’t counted as billable activity.
• Filtering in real-time: Google also uses real-time filters that stop suspicious clicks from being counted before they even have a chance to appear in your reports.
• Filtering in near real-time: Another system checks clicks for suspicious behavior and filters them out of your reports within a few hours.
• Manual Checks: In cases where unusual activity is detected, but the automatic filters didn’t catch it, the activity is sent to Google’s specialist team for manual review.
• Research and botnet hunting: A team of engineers and data scientists is dedicated to finding new ways to detect invalid traffic and botnets.
• Blocking suspicious accounts: If any accounts are found to be participating in fraudulent activity, they’re blocked.

Are Google’s mechanisms against Invalid Traffic helpful then?

To some degree, yes. But Google certainly does not catch all of them. Advertisers lose billions to invalid traffic every year – and these costs are expected to continue to grow exponentially to 100 billion US dollars by 2023.

The truth is that Google simply cannot keep up to speed with every fraudster or new click fraud methods targeting users across their entire ad network. And that’s exactly why advertisers also need to be involved in stopping invalid clicks in Google Ads themselves. To start with, let’s look at how advertisers can identify them.

Six signs to look out for when identifying click fraud:

• Sudden surges in clicks: If your ads receive several clicks in a short amount of time, it could be a sign of click fraud, especially if the visits are coming from the same IP address and from locations that are not part of your target area.
• Unusual peaks in impressions: A inexplicable rise in the number of impressions, i.e., the number of times your ad is shown, could be a sign of fraudulent activity. Your ad may be showing in the wrong placements or fraudulent websites.
• Low conversion rates: No conversions for high amounts of traffic may be a sign of click fraud, especially if the traffic is not human and cannot convert.
• Very high Click-Through Rate (CTR): Unusual click spikes can be spotted by looking at your CTR. You should put this metric into perspective with other metrics to identify if something is wrong.
• Low number of page views: Low engagement, despite high traffic, could indicate bot traffic.
• High bounce rates: A lack of interest in your content can be shown by high bounce rates. This could also be a sign of non-human traffic.

In addition to these six signs, there are a few other indicators of click fraud to be aware of:

• An unusual amount of time spent on site: Too little or too much time spent on a website can indicate a lack of engagement or bot activity.
• Lack of interactions: No interaction with the website after clicking on an ad can be a sign of bot traffic.
• Unusual IP addresses: Traffic coming in from outside of your targeted locations or from places where you have no activity may also be indicative of bot traffic.
• Bad ad placements: Suspicious-looking domain names and strange-looking applications may indicate fraudulent activity.

It is worth noting that if you do manage to identify fraudulent clicks on your Google Ads campaign, you can submit a Google Ads Refund Request – but keep in mind there is no guarantee you’ll get a refund. Furthermore, you will also have to do a lot digging through web logs and arrange data to make it easy for Google Ads’ investigators verify your claim. The number of claims you can make are also limited and can take more than six weeks to be processed.

You can read more about Google Ads Refunds in our extensive guide here.

How To Stop Invalid Clicks in Google Ads – The Manual Way

After you’ve identified unusual activity on your web logs that may indicate fraudulent or invalid clicks, you can manually block some of this traffic from reaching your ad campaigns.

Here is a step-by-step process on how to do this yourself:

Step #1: Find suspicious IP addresses

Despite having an invalid click detection filter, Google will still charge you for invalid clicks that slip under their radar. This means you should have your own invalid click detection system in place that audits the IP address of clicks on your ads.

One way to do this is to use your own IP tracker tools to audit IPs that pass Google’s filter. It’s not uncommon to find IPs that send constant traffic, but they don’t convert. As mentioned in our six signs to look out for, all the IPs that result in no conversion, have a high bounce rate, and spend minimal time on your site could be costing you money and therefore require investigation.

You can find IPs manually by looking at timestamp and user agent data – but this usually takes a lot of time, which is why it is best to use an IP tracking tool with an advanced algorithm built in.

Create a list of all the suspicious IP addresses and move to the next step.

Step #2: See who owns the IP addresses

This is where most advertisers go wrong: Not all the IP addresses that you think are fraudulent are actually fraudulent.

You should check which network who owns the IP address before you stop receiving traffic from it. Not all IPs that send heaps of traffic should be excluded. For instance, there are instances where large networks mask device behind proxy servers allowing them to use the same IP. It won’t be a good idea to exclude such IPs since they all may be completely unrelated to one another.

Here is what you should do:

Inspect the origin of the IP addresses you identified to see who owns the IP address. If it is a proxy server and searches from this IP are different and are naturally distributed, you can exclude the IP from your suspicious list as it’s likely not fraudulent – unless, of course, you see a clear pattern of abusive behavior.

Step #3: Exclude misbehaving IPs in AdWords

Finally, you’ll want to remove IP addresses from your Google Ads campaign that are engaged in fraudulent tactics. You can follow these steps to stop receiving traffic from these IP addresses.

1. Visit your Google Ads account
2. Click the Settings from the left sidebar and then click the Campaign
3. Click Additional settings
4. Click IP exclusions
5. Enter IP addresses and click Save when done to block the IP addresses you just added

There you go! You won’t receive traffic from these IPs any longer.

Keep in mind:

IP exclusion is a continuous process and you should check for fraudulent IPs regularly. If your campaign is being targeted by a competitor; they might use many tools to change IPs on a regular basis. This can quickly turn into an endless game of cat and mouse, which is why it is best to have click fraud prevention and detection software to do the fighting for you.

How do you check for invalid Clicks on Google AdSense?

Google AdSense offers an opportunity for publishers to monetize their online content by displaying ads that are matched to their site’s content and audience. This matching process is done by AdSense, which analyzes the publisher’s website and the interests of the visitors to determine the most relevant ads to display. Advertisers create and pay for these ads, with the intention of promoting their products to potential customers.

One of the advantages of AdSense is that it allows publishers to focus on creating quality content while AdSense takes care of finding advertisers and displaying relevant ads. Additionally, AdSense offers a variety of ad formats, including display ads, text ads, and link units, which can be customized to match the look and feel of the website.

To participate in AdSense, publishers must apply to the program and meet certain eligibility criteria, such as having a website with unique and original content that complies with Google’s policies. Once approved, publishers can choose where on their website they would like to display ads, and AdSense will start serving relevant ads. Publishers earn money whenever visitors click on the ads, with the revenue split between the publisher and Google.

What about click fraud on AdSense?

Invalid traffic and click fraud aren’t limited to Google AdSense. They happen on virtually any kind of Google Ads campaign. But with Google AdSense, things get a little more complex because publishers are sometimes part of the problem.

On the one hand, Google AdSense publishers lie at the foundation of the entire AdSense ecosystem – and so, they play a huge part in how Google charges advertisers.

On the other hand, if publishers drive fake clicks on the AdSense ads they host on their site, it is the advertisers that suffer wasted ad spend. It is for this reason that Google has implemented a series of measures to prevent Invalid Traffic and chastise rogue publishers.

That being said, it is important to note publishers themselves can become victims of click fraud or invalid traffic. It could be a competing publisher driving false, irrelevant, or even bot-actioned clicks on your site. Or it could be too many readers erratically clicking on ads. Whatever it is, if you are a publisher and you want to make sure you don’t get suspended by Google, you will want to check invalid clicks in your Google AdSense account.

If you are a publisher, you can identify click fraud by following these steps:

1. Go to your AdSense Dashboard.
2. Click on Payments.
3. Click on View Transactions.
4. Select the date range you want to check.
5. Invalid traffic will appear listed in the table.

AdSense Click Bombing – When Villains Become Victims

Google blocks AdSense accounts if they suspect unusual activity that might drive invalid traffic to the ads published through their program. As Google itself has stated, “Some publishers have had issues with invalid traffic when partnering with low-quality ad networks, search engines, or directory sites in efforts to increase traffic to their site.”

And yet, publishers can sometimes become victims of the villainous acts they’re accused of. AdSense click bombing is a type of click fraud that’s carried out against AdSense publishers. This is done by artificially inflating the number of clicks on ads shown on a publisher’s site to get them kicked out of the AdSense program.

What’s important here is that ad fraudsters don’t need to access your AdSense account to bomb your ads. They just need to click on them repeatedly – either manually (sometimes through click farms) or automatically (through bots and botnets).

As a publisher, there are some things you can do to prevent AdSense bombing. Some of the more common tips of advice include:

• Don’t click on your own ads. While this is unlikely to have a significant impact with a small amount of clicks, it is still against Google’s AdSense Policy.
• Don’t ask others to click on your ads. The same reasoning applies here, as encouraging readers to repeatedly click on your ads can get you removed as an AdSense publisher.
• Monitor your web traffic to identify fraudulent clicks.

The Best Way to Block Invalid Clicks in Google Ads

The simplest and most effective way to combat fraudulent traffic is by using click fraud protection software that can identify and block click fraud for you.

ClickGUARD is an essential tool for anyone running PPC ads as it protects your campaigns from unwanted clicks and wasteful traffic. By utilizing advanced algorithms to detect and prevent click fraud, bots, and other illegitimate clicks, it saves your ad budget for real, legitimate clicks that drive conversions.

In addition to eliminating unwanted clicks, ClickGUARD also provides detailed reports that give you insights into your campaign’s performance, helping you optimize your targeting and ad spend. Our latest version also comes equipped with fully automated features, making it easier than ever to manage your campaigns and focus on other aspects of your business.

Get Protected from Click Fraud Today

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