One of the biggest issues that PPC (Pay-per-click online ad campaigns) marketers are facing is click fraud. Over the past two decades, there has been a massive marketing revolution. Marketers enjoyed the leap from newspaper and billboards to radio and TV and today they can now advertise to anyone via the Internet and social media.

It’s obvious why we see fewer billboards or even companies attempting to use those methods. They’re practically relics best left in the past.

But while technology has enriched everyone’s lives, careers, and respective industries in general, there are still a wide variety of problems. And one prime example of that is the PPC marketing industry.

For those not familiar with PPC this form of marketing is nothing new. To give you an example of what it’s like think of it like this:

You’re running a grocery store and decide you want to attract more people to your store. Instead of putting on a huge marketing campaign, you decide to buy a certain amount of leaflets promoting your store. You may even offer a discount coupon on it too.

Anyway, you place these leaflets at the front of your store and around the surrounding area. After a week, you notice more people coming to your store and you also notice the number of leaflets on the stand is less.

PPC works in the same fashion. Your online advertisement is the leaflet and your cost per click is how much it cost you to print that leaflet.

It all sounds too good to be true right? Well the method itself is not scammy, however there is a snag with this issue. Because this new form of advertising is so powerful, there is a lot of money changing hands and it’s attracted people who will actually scam you.

How will they scam you? Simple. Through something called click fraud. This activity alone costs businesses billions every year. What’s worse is that because click fraud is so easy to do, a lot of businesses are at risk.

To put it into perspective how dangerous this can be, let’s go back to my leaflet example I used to describe pay per click.

Of course in this scenario you are still paying for the leaflets no matter what. PPC advertising works in the same way where you are still paying for the online ad.

But what if someone picks up a leaflet (i.e. clicks on an ad) and then doesn’t do anything with it? What if they pick them all up and tear them up? You’re still charged your flat rate for that advertisement you put up, however you didn’t get the lead that was assured to you. What’s worse is you’ll have to buy more leaflets or else no one will hear about your business.

That is what click fraud is at its core. It’s clicking on a pay per click advertisement in order to generate fraudulent charges for advertisers. This is why it costs advertisers billions of dollars. Since 2017 1 in 5 clicks on advertisements were fraudulent and the number has been rising every month since then.

It drives up advertising costs and in some cases those businesses can’t compete. PPC is designed for companies with tighter budgets and not as many resources. And those are the people who are hurt the most from this: small and medium-sized businesses.

And you’d think with such a massive industry like this there is a tighter grip on this situation right? Sadly that’s not the case.

There have been some address to this issue in the form of Google opening what most people call the ad quality center. Basically it’s a center devoted to monitoring ads and reimbursing advertisers who are subject to fraudulent behaviour. It all sounds amazing but it’s undercut by the fact click fraud is still extremely hard to detect.

As I said, click fraud is still on the rise to this day as fraudsters are using more advanced robots to slip under the radar.

So what can we do about it?

Well as a consumer there is little we can do. The best behavior is honestly to not click on an ad that you’re not interested in.

As a business though it’s key to look at your PPC campaigns and figure out where traffic is coming from. This sounds easy on paper but it’s trickier than you think.

It involves getting the visitor data and exporting it into a spreadsheet. The catch is, you’ll likely have data from thousands or tens of thousands of people through this process. From there it’s sifting through that list to look for any kind of suspicious behavior.

At the end of the day it’s a massive headache and a hassle to deal with and there is no other way around it other than checking the IP addresses and determining whether to block it or not.