Stop click fraud and protect your budget.

Click fraud is a fraudulent practice where automated scripts, bots, malware, or human fraudsters imitate legitimate visitors of a web browser to generate a charge-per-click without any genuine interest in the ad's target link.

Analyzing visitor behavior can help uncover and prevent click fraud on ad campaigns. Whether you're running an advertising network or trying to reach potential customers for your business, leveraging machine learning and human expert analysis can detect and prevent instances of click fraud.

Businesses trying to earn more revenue through digital marketing quickly learn the value of tracking fraudulent activities. Anytime paid traffic is involved, there will be those who seek to take advantage of the system. To prevent click fraud, the only solution today is to seek a company that specializes in fraud mitigation.

Data science enables companies running click campaigns to get fraud protection, potentially saving them thousands in lost advertising capital. By continually scanning thousands of data points, it's possible to see which clicks are from real visitors and which ones are fake or accidental.

Click fraud accounts for nearly 60% of the $100 billion total cost of ad fraud in 2022, whether on a search engine or as part of a display ad campaign. This drives up advertising costs for companies, pushing their ad budgets into the red before they can produce the expected sales.

Click fraud is a serious issue not just for marketers but also consumers. That's because it can impact the cost of online advertising for companies which ultimately increases the prices that consumers pay for goods and services. In some of the worst cases, click fraud can also be used to distribute malware, causing further financial damage. For companies advertising online, getting the help of fraud prevention software is essential.

It's not always easy to identify click fraud. Whether you're running click campaigns or utilizing display advertising networks, your traffic quality could be far worse than you might realize. If you’re seeing high CTRs with no conversions, traffic from odd sources, weird spikes in clicks, more abandoned shopping carts, rapidly draining budgets or high bounce rates, these are all signs of click fraud.

Click fraud has the potential to completely change the outcome of your digital ad campaigns. Invalid traffic to Google Ads with a high cost per click can rapidly drain the coffers of even a well-funded advertising budget. This means you won't be able to reach as many of your ideal customers as you could have when you started the campaign.

Detecting invalid traffic and other forms of click fraud is critical to maximizing the ROI of your ads. Beyond the copy and creative of your digital ad, there is simply no better way to improve your ROAS.

Click fraud scams can attack digital ad campaigns in numerous ways. Common types of scams include click farms, bot traffic, fake clicks, and link masking to deceive online visitors into clicking. Fraudulent activity can be motivated by many factors, from heated business competition to earning affiliate income. No matter if you're marketing with paid search, display ads, or social media, there's a chance you'll fall prey to one of these scams.

As the ways to advertise online have evolved over the years, so have ways to defraud companies of their ad campaign dollars. Let's look at some of the examples.

Google Ads

With the rise of Google Ads campaigns, inventive new methods of generating invalid clicks have exploded in number. Suspicious clicks from one computer could be competitor clicks or bot clicks, for example.

Invalid Traffic

Invalid activity can drive traffic to your site that seems promising but never turns into sales. The advertiser pays their bill thinking they've reached human visitors, but in reality, it's just fake traffic created by fraudsters. This problem has increased substantially over the years with the decline in computing costs.

Fraudulent Clicks Based on Geographic Locations

Local companies who are trying to maximize their marketing ROI know how important it is to localize their advertising efforts online. Unfortunately, fraudsters know this too, so they've found ways to make it appear as though their location is a paying customer nearby.

Protecting your business from click fraud starts with data-driven decisions made by the watchful eye of experts. From simply blocking fraudulent clicks on your ads to flagging suspicious activity, Anura helps you avoid overpaying for ads that don't produce. 

Anura empowers companies with a complete solution for catching and preventing click fraud. We also offer an easy-to-understand dashboard that shows you what clicks have been blocked, providing complete transparency into the process. Discover how Anura lowers your chances of false positives when blocking click fraud. Contact us to get started today.

Competitor Fraud occurs when a fraudster repeatedly clicks on the competitor’s ads to rapidly drain a competitor’s ad budget in order for their own ads to rank higher or run unopposed. In some instances, a competitor can click on your online ads in an attempt to drive up the amount that you pay for search term keywords — even when targeting extremely expensive terms.

Influencer fraud occurs when an influencer is either using bots or other techniques to artificially inflate their engagement with the advertiser. Sometimes, the influencer isn't even a real person.

There's a major problem with getting fake likes from click farms: it skews your marketing data. Social media platforms can map out the demographics and psychographics of an entire population based on what posts they like — meaning that if half the audience is built solely off fakes, then those metrics won't be accurate. This could result in them trying to put content before audiences unqualified for such information and would be disastrous for your bottom lines.

Competitor fraud occurs when a brand hacks and creates fake profiles to follow and like a competitor's account to hurt their business and get into their followers' feeds. They also might hack into competitors' accounts and post inappropriate content. It can be costly for the hacked company in terms of time spent cleaning up their mess, but it also poses serious risks to people whose accounts were taken over by hackers — what might they post? How will this affect customer engagement rates or sales revenue streams if we see inappropriate content popping up all over social media channels?

Using our Search and Social Protect feature, your ads will be hidden automatically to protect your budget and ensure that your ads are only being seen by real people. Never worry about your ads being shown to fraudulent visitors again.