Tips for Preventing Click Fraud

Posted by Josh on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006.

The Marketing Experiments Blog recently posted the results of a click fraud study. The study itself is interesting but somewhat inconclusive due to its short duration and limited scope. However, they make some excellent suggestions for preventing or at least reducing click fraud, some of which include:

Watch for significant variations in ad campaign performance.
Be conservative with content ads.
Don’t display ads where you don’t sell products and services (e.g. if you only sell in the U.S., don’t display ads in Europe).
Use analytics tools or click-fraud-detection tools. (I’m skeptical about the economics of the latter for small campaigns.)
Click fraud from search engines is quite low, not so for contextual ads (3rd party websites).
Measure your results and ROI so that you can bid to your budget, not because you would like to see your ad in the #1 position for branding purposes.
Find alternatives to expensive, high traffic keywords as these tend to attract more fraud.