Anura PR Team
Click fraud tools that actually work for Google ads and Facebook campaigns must have the obvious feature of true, real-time blocking features or “pre-click” analysis either through server side/edge script or an API while also automatically adding invalid traffic to exclusion lists. If the tool you’re looking for doesn’t offer this type of protection, it’s not truly real time. Some tools will say it’s real-time, but really they’re doing periodic checks, which catch fraudulent clicks after the fact or add them to IP exclusion lists, but you’ve already paid for the click. Effective real-time tools will also add fraudulent clicks to exclusion lists on your ad platforms in real time to prevent bots and fraudsters from seeing your ads in the future, further protecting your advertising budgets.
Understanding that click fraud tools work means you need to know how they work, and then you can make a determination on how important real time prevention is to your business model.
What Business Models NEED Real-Time Fraud Prevention for Google & Facebook Ads
If your business model either pays or gets paid from a click, real-time click fraud protection is crucial because of the sheer amount of bots that are clicking through links on the internet. Recent reports have put the volume of bot traffic in the 40%-60% territory depending on the report, with total volume growing as AI enables more and more bot proliferation. Whatever the exact volume, the abundance of bots puts your traffic and payment models at constant risk of fake results with real consequences. For example, if you are running a CPC or cost per click model where you are buying clicks, an unprotected ad strategy can quickly burn budget on clicks that will never convert especially if you are using Google Pmax campaigns or Meta Advantage+ placements where low-quality, third-party publishers may host your ads and flood your ads with fraudulent clicks (we have seen clients with upwards of 90% fraudulent clicks from a single low-quality source). On the flip side, if you are getting paid from a CPC model, you leave yourself open to reputation damage and claw backs or refunds from sending poor-quality traffic. A common example of this is Google, which regularly forces refunds on traffic they bought if they find retroactively that your traffic didn’t pass their standards. In this case, we have seen entire businesses go under because they didn’t scan their traffic, then spent the revenue they earned from one month only to have huge amounts of the revenue clawed back the next month with nothing in the bank to cover it.
CPC isn’t the only business model where real-time blocking is important. Lead Generation and Affiliate verticals are both susceptible to click fraud because at their core, they need high-quality, human traffic to hit their ultimate goal of conversion. Usually these business models pay on a CPL or CPA model, which is often referred to broadly as a performance model, meaning that publishers/affiliates/influencers are paid only when a product is purchased or a lead is created (this can be a high-intent inquiry, an application or anything else where a real person fills out a form).
What Real-Time Click Fraud Should Solve
Real-time click fraud tools work by analyzing each visitor or “click” that goes to your owned web properties and making a determination on:
Is this click a bot?
Bots are making up more and more of the internet, and if you are on any kind of performance model or in the business of buying or selling traffic all bots are bad. There is a lot of literature on good bots, and for your content, good bots are an essential part of making sure your website is getting the proper visibility from search engines and AI tools. However, if you need traffic that converts, even good bots aren’t necessarily beneficial because these clicks won’t turn into revenue. This isn’t to say that you want to block them all, but it is crucial to be able to identify these bots in real-time so you can take real-time actions on them outlined below and add certain good bots to exclusion lists on your ad platforms to prevent burning more ad spend.
Is this click a known fraudster?
Ad fraud is thought to eat up to 20-25% of all digital marketing spend, making it a serious drain for digital advertising budgets across all organizations. With the total money spent on digital advertising projected to grow to x by 2028, this means that fraud isn’t going anywhere making it a constant threat to marketers trying to grow or even maintain their spending. The tool you consider should constantly be adding known fraudsters to their block and exclusion lists in addition to looking for common signals of fraudulent activity like residential proxies, spoofing, botnets and human fraud farms.
Is this click a human?
This question is essential for any tool you select because it needs to be the focus for any traffic that you’re buying, sending or trying to convert to revenue. Any tool you consider should be looking for humans, which is referred to in the industry as the “false positive accuracy” metric. This false positive for click fraud tools means that they inaccurately identified a real human, which is really a potential conversion, as a bot or fraudster. This can happen because their IP is flagged (IP addresses can be spoofed or used through a residential proxy, meaning that just because an IP was fraudulent once doesn’t guarantee that it’s fraudulent the next time). This could also happen if the human user is using more advanced browser privacy settings that can obscure the signals used for detection. For you, this means you should be checking for tools that have high accuracy or even better accuracy guarantees around their false positive rate. No tool is perfect, but there needs to be focus on this area.
So Who Do You Pick?
At the end of the day, you should choose the tool where you can verify their claims, either through a trial or a data audit. Anura offers a free traffic quality audit to show you the extent of your fraud first while also trying out the product to give you a real-time evaluation. This audit is industry standard for credible tools, so you should have ample opportunity to vet your choice heavily in advance. Start by getting a traffic quality audit from Anura today.
