PPC fraud refers to the fraudulent activities that occur on the internet, especially in pay-per-click campaigns. As a matter of fact, 20% of pay-per-click ads are fraudulent, which amounts to about $60,000,000,000 every single year. Such fraudulent activities seem to be growing by 52% each year (from 2015 to 2020).
You can only imagine the criticality of the context and the wrath it would unleash on businesses around the world. If you are still trying to figure out the loss your business could actually incur due to PPC fraud, this blog is an eye-opener for you.
Invest some time in reading it and know about the three most alarming ways your business gets vulnerable in the hands of PPC fraud.
Table of Contents
#1. You are losing clients; a lot of them
Yes, you are, and probably, you are not aware of it. That is apparently the saddest part of the story. For a moment, put yourself in your clients’ shoes and try imagining the situation. Would you entertain the very feeling of being cheated by click baits? That’s what pay-per-click fraud does to your business. All prospective clients feel annoyed by irrelevant and intrusive ads.
For example, imagine a scenario where a student is looking for online assignment help, notices a couple of flash ads popping up with messages related to his/her search query. The person eventually clicks on the ad, only to land on a website that deals with services that are not associated with the claims made on the ad banner. Won’t he/she feel cheated by this?
Do you think they will ever return to your website again? You may drive a few good traffics with the clicks accumulated via PPC ads. But, have you thought about the fact that the ads were irrelevant to your target audience? Do you think it will benefit your business operations in the near future?
#2. Creates a suspicious image of your brand
You cannot afford to come up with intrusive ads and irrelevant click baits all the time. This will not only annoy your prospective customers, but it will also force them to take strict actions on ethical grounds. Have you ever thought of it?
Take a look at the potential threats your business might be exposed to.
- Too many suspicious ads and intrusive click baits might force your target audience to report against such activities. As a consequence, you might be asked to take down the campaign or shut down your operations in the near future.
- If you end up creating a suspicious image of your brand or services, then the chances are that you won’t be able to make your presence felt on ethical grounds.
- As a result, you will be losing credibility in the eyes of stakeholders, overseas investors, patent clients and the likes.
#3. Click spoofing is bringing down your mobile audience
Click spoofing is yet another fraud that mainly affects the revenue generation. It said to mostly affect mobile applications and traffic generated from there. Do you know global mobile data traffic amounts to more than 30 Exabyte per month? You can certainly imagine the amount of business you are going to lose in the long run.
This is how click-spoofing is refraining all prospective mobile audience from converting into promising customers.
- Ad fraud in mobile advertising leads to illegitimate installs, virus intrusions and hacks.
- As a consequence, users will gradually start avoiding your brand, services or products by all means.
- Many faulty applications end up degrading internet speed to a great extent. Do you think any user will tolerate such setbacks for long?
Keeping PPC Frauds at Bay
Having stated PPC frauds can bring your business down to, we must also put the best effort to keep such odds at bay. So, here a few suggestions you may like to consider while fighting off the evil in a way it is supposed to be.
- Keep a tab on your competitors on PPC. Evaluate whether they are up to any kind of intrusive activities that might ruin your brand’s reputation.
- You should start investing more on fraud prevention software such as Fraud.net, MarkMonitor and Signifyd.
- Make it a point to target only high-value sites for your PPC campaigns and rope in reputable advertisers to take charge of your projects.
- Limit your exposure, run your ad campaigns only in countries that foster secured digital advertising. According to market survey, Norway, United States, Australia and Sweden top the chart in this context.
Cheers!
Also Read: Top 7 Qualities to Look for in a Digital Marketing Agency
