State-Of-Art Fraud Protection Solution for your PPC Campaign

How big of a problem is Click Fraud? $800M. In July 2006, the Financial Times reported that online advertisers paid over $800M last year for fraudulent clicks, or nearly 15% of all clicks billed to advertisers. In competitive industries with high bid costs, the percentage is likely to be closer to 30%, and on second-tier search engines can run as high as 80%. Google CFO George Reyes even told the Wall Street Journal that click fraud “is the biggest threat to the Internet economy.”

Click fraud is defined as any type of clicking on paid search engine ads that is done with ill intent—specifically, the intent to drain the PPC advertisers’ budgets. On Google, impression fraud is a related problem where cheaters generate numerous ad impressions for a given keyword to reduce a competitor’s click through rate, thereby lowering his Google listing position.

In its simplest form, click fraud can be executed by a simple automated script generating a high number of clicks on competitor’s ads. This type of fraud is relatively easy to catch and combat. However, most click fraud is more sophisticated. It can originate in any number of ways—by humans or automated scripts, single or distributed, from masked or shared IPs, across one or more search engines. And the problem is dynamic, as fraud perpetrators come up with increasingly devious means to their ends.

How do you protect yourself?

NetElixir offers a cost effective way to take the offense against click fraud. Our unique, proactive click fraud protection system guards against potential losses as they occur, not only protecting our customers’ ROI but giving them peace-of-mind as well.

Our full service solution starts with a web-based fraud protection tool that provides you with customized fraud protection settings, alerts and reports. In addition, our fraud auditing team provides 24x7 active fraud monitoring. Since changes to normal search engine traffic patterns are often the best indicators of fraud, we monitor your campaign’s impressions and clicks around the clock, and can take steps to stop fraud in real time, rather than waiting for search engines to refund charges post-mortem. By providing the right combination of technology and service, NetElixir is uniquely able to protect against many types of click fraud, not just simple single-IP attacks.

Key features of our solution include:

• 24x7 active click and impression fraud monitoring and real time intervention
• Detection of suspicious clicks with customizable settings
• Blocking of clicks from unwanted geographies
• Alerting and blocking of suspicious clickers
• Email notification when fraud is detected
• Detailed fraud reports
• Documentation and follow up with search engines on fraud cases

The net result?

NetElixir can typically reduce your fraud-based losses by about 80%.