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Creating A Click Fraud Action Plan For Your PPC Campaign
By John McElborough (c) 2007

OK so you've read or heard enough to make you concerned about
click fraud. In a 2006 survey of 1400 search marketers in the
U.S under 50% of the group had plans to monitor click fraud
across their campaign in the coming 6 months (MarketingSherpa)
so by creating an action plan now you will already be in the
minority of mindful and risk conscious PPC marketers. Your PPC
click fraud action plan will be tailored to your own campaign
budget and your analysis of the risk level involved. Here's a
guideline.

Allocate a Budget

This should be relative to your campaign ROI. If you're
spending £1000/ month (roughly $2,000 USD) and you measure your
campaign ROI at 125% you're not going to want to spend £250/
month (roughly $500 USD) monitoring click fraud. If you haven't
noticed the effects of click fraud already, chances are your
invalid click level will be 5% or lower so as a general rule you
won't want to regularly invest more than 5% of your estimated
gross campaign profit back into click fraud detection. (The %
effort for click fraud detection should be taken from your profit
and not from your campaign budget as this is supplementary work.
If you detect zero invalid clicks, you will still have spent the
same total budget.)

Assign Responsibility

Who will be responsible for monitoring invalid clicks across
your campaign? If your PPC account is managed internally by
your marketing team this may be another role for them in their
regular account maintenance duties. If you use an agency to
manage your PPC, they may take responsibility for this either
included in your package or at an additional cost. Ask your
agency what their policy and action plan is for click fraud
detection. If your campaign budget exceeds around £5k a month
($10,200 USD), you may want to consider using a click fraud
vendor (a specialist agency dealing with click fraud) these
have sprung up across the U.S and are starting to appear in the
UK too (I will review UK vendors in future posts or there may
be ads on this page).

Decide on a Timescale

You may be losing money to click fraud on your PPC campaigns
right now. Then again chances are if you haven't noticed you
may not be. The major search engines do monitor click fraud or
invalid clicks and should alert you to this but none the less,
if you have a larger PPC budget, you should be doing your own
monitoring right now. Calculate how much you could be losing
based on your total spend and a ball park figure of 5% invalid
clicks due to click fraud. Then work out how many hours you
should be assigning to this. If you calculate you could be
wasting up to £1000/ month and you value your time at £100/
hour then any time under 10 hours a month spent on click fraud
detection could make it a profitable exercise. Set a date for
review, say at 3 months and 6 months and report back to all
parties responsible for the campaign to analyse the estimated
impact of click fraud on your PPC budget. If you have found
nothing suspicious after 3 months, put click fraud detection
work on hold for 3 months and do another audit.

Make it Policy

Make click fraud detection part of your PPC campaign policy and
procedure. Make it a subject at planning meetings and try to fit
monitoring into your day to day account maintenance.

Doing It

A plan is worth nothing without effective implementation. Click
fraud can be a complex area but there are some simple signs to
look out for. Here's a summary of the top signs of click fraud:

1. Click through rate (CTR). Monitor your CTR's historically and
look for sudden, sharp % increases. Sometimes these may be
explainable i.e. the seasonal nature of your AdWords campaign,
but it could also indicate these clicks are invalid or
fraudulent.

2. Sudden drops in conversion rates. If your campaigns usually
convert at a steady 3% month in month out and this suddenly
drops for no apparent business reason, it could indicate click
fraud as invalid clicks will rarely go through your site any
further than the destination URL landing page.

3. Faster than usual daily spend. Look at your hourly data and
get a feel for when in the day your budget usually runs low and
your ads stop showing. If on 1 day or a run of days your budget
runs out sooner than usual, it could be a sign of click fraud.

4. Keyword stat variations. Look at very similar keywords that
usually attract similar CTR's. A spike in 1 keyword and not the
other is a tell-tell sign of click fraud.

5. Suspicious IP addresses. Your web logs or Google Analytics
will give you a record of the IP addresses of every visitor to
your site. Although not all ISP's provide their customers with
unique IP addresses, above average page impressions for a
certain IP address is often the best way of spotting click
fraud and Google may ask you for this information when
conducting a click fraud investigation on your behalf. Google
Analytics is a really useful way of matching IP addresses to
PPC clicks.

6. High traffic levels from unusual locations. Again your web
stats or Analytics will help you here. Look at the geographic
location of your PPC clicks. If you run an international
campaign, look for high levels from countries you don't usually
deal with or where a different language is spoken. If you're UK
based, look for unusually high click densities coming from
particular locations even though your campaign or product is
not regionally based.

7. Remember look at CTR's and conversion rates separately for
search clicks and content network clicks otherwise the overall
data could be skewed.

Above all remember it is the smallest percentage of pay per
click advertisers who ever see serious effects from click fraud
so be cautious but don't sacrifice the benefits of a well
managed pay per click campaign for irrational concerns.
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John McElborough is a UK search marketing specialist and Google
Adwords professional. Read the Vanilla Digital search marketing
blog at http://www.vanilladigital.com
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