Over the past few weeks we have been spending extra attention to the evil beast of PPC advertising: click fraud. During the holiday rush it is easy to miss suspicious traffic since the ‘normal’ campaign metrics no longer apply. Traffic soars, adcopy needs to be updated to reflect the latest offers, items go in or out of stock, seasonal and holiday related keywords come and go. All this within the space of a few weeks.

There were two main reasons to really scrutinize our traffic for fraudulent clicks at this time of the year:

1. To offset the increased risk of click fraud during the peak retail season.
2. To see if Google’s assertion that they catch most invalid clicks holds true when traffic volumes spike.

We looked at mountains of data from our campaigns and created experiments to test the robustness of our own monitoring systems and Google’s filters. In general, we found that both performed really well although one can never assert with 100% probably whether or not a click is fraudulent (the best you’d come to certainty is when it converts into a sale).

We learned a lot from this exercise and decided to update our click fraud risk calculator based on our findings. This calculator does not tell you what percentage of your traffic is fraudulent. Google already does an excellent job at that if you’re not using your own (or third-party) monitoring systems. What it does do is assess the risk profile of your PPC campaign so you can take appropriate measures to mitigate this risk.

Hopefully you will find our little tool very useful and if you are interested in a more in-depth analysis of the intricacies of click fraud, have a look at this Google click fraud presentation, or read more about our findings here.