Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO and SEM) strategies are important in driving organic traffic to your site. Many businesses that want to improve their sales to new levels are increasingly resorting to paid traffic to support and complement these efforts. The need and importance of online marketing campaigns to small and medium businesses cannot be gainsaid. A well-thought-out, properly designed and tightly-package online marketing campaign will significantly increase traffic to the website for your business, improve customer engagements and drive sales through the roof.
To get the maximum return on investment (ROI) out of your online marketing campaign, you need to ensure you are getting only high-quality clicks resulting in conversions. You have to detect, prevent and block click frauds which only deplete your marketing budget without the conversion rates to show for the money spent.
Click fraud prevention tools should be able to do the following:
- Geo track the source of your clicks
A good click fraud prevention tool should be able to tell where every single of your clicks and sales are coming from. Geo-tracking shows the IP addresses of the traffic and visitors on your site and their geographic locations. This very useful in knowing whether the increased traffic is resulting in any conversions or sales. For example, you would want to know if all your sales are coming in from Canada, but most of your clicks originate from Mexico. The algorithms of a click fraud prevention tool detect such click frauds and protect you from getting billed for such.
- Keyword monitoring
To prevent click frauds, your click fraud prevention tool should be able to monitor which specific keywords result in the most clicks and higher conversion rate. Non-performing keywords attracting fraudulent clicks can be reworked or lost altogether.
Monitoring the performance of your keywords is particularly useful in assessing the performance of your campaign and improving your Google quality score. The quality and relevance of the keywords employed in your ad campaign affect how high it will be ranked by search engines and how frequently it is viewed.
- Fraud blocking
Tools such as the Adwatcher analyze all the clicks on your ads and provides around the clock monitoring of your online campaign across all platforms, be it email marketing or Google Adwords. When suspicious activity is detected from a certain IP address or search engines and their affiliates, they are immediately blocked and an email of the threat sent to you. This prevents bots, fraudulent search engine partners and your competition from spamming your ads in order to boost their revenues and deplete your online marketing campaign budget.
The detected threats are then reported to search engines for punitive actions to be taken against them in order to prevent a repeat and further attacks.
- Traffic analysis
One of the most important metrics in click fraud prevention is the traffic analysis. A sudden inexplicable increase in traffic point towards possible click frauds. The good thing is that a click fraud prevention tool is able to detect these spikes early and protect you against them.
