A Comprehensive Guide to Preventing Ad Fraud on Google Ads

Greetings from your friendly neighborhood Google Ad Specialist! In the ever-evolving world of digital advertising, it's crucial to ensure the integrity of your campaigns. Google Ads offers an array of features to help maintain this integrity by preventing your ads from appearing on websites and sources that might be invalid or fraudulent.

Best way to prevent and block fraudulent clicks

The best way to prevent fraudulent clicks on your Google Ads is by using a fraud-blocking tool like Slaterock Automation. It allows you to stop excessive clicks and spam IPs from clicking on your ads, wasting your budget.

What Are Spam Bots?

What are Fraudulent IPs?

Get Started Preventing Fraud Today

Using Automation to Stop Fraudulent Clicks On Your Google Ads

Harnessing the power of automation can significantly streamline your ad fraud prevention strategy. A tool like Slaterock's Fraud Block Tool is specially designed to handle this task with precision.

By continually analyzing your web traffic, this solution identifies suspicious behaviors indicative of invalid or fraudulent sources. These could include abnormal click patterns, mismatched geolocation data, and signs of bot activity, among other anomalies. The tool assigns a fraud score to each traffic source, taking into consideration these irregularities.

Once a source's score surpasses a certain threshold, the tool marks it as potentially fraudulent. It then automatically adds such suspicious IP addresses to your Google Ads account's "IP exclusion list," thereby preventing your ads from appearing on potentially harmful websites.

By using Slaterock's Fraud Block Tool, you can protect your advertising budget and ensure the integrity of your campaigns with minimal manual effort.

Example of our fraud-blocking tool stopping a user from wasting our budget

Above you can see how some users will try clicking on an ad over and over again to reduce its competitiveness in the marketplace. Often times these are competitors that will waste your budget.

The Strategy Behind Fraud Blocking

A key strategy for ad fraud prevention involves meticulously monitoring your inbound web traffic and scrutinizing for any peculiar behaviors. This scrutiny helps to identify sources that may not be human, such as bots or even illicit activity from competitors.

We'll share some of these suspicious behaviors you should look out for:

• Excessively repetitive clicks in a short time frame

• Sources providing misleading referral data

• Devices operating without a graphics card

• Discrepancies between the actual location and the reported country of origin

• Traffic sources that only remain on your website for less than a second

• Use of VPN, TOR or other privacy-enabled servers that bots often use to conceal their identity

• Accessing from IP addresses listed in public blacklists, for instance, on platforms like fireHOL.org

• An unusually high ratio of IP addresses for a single visitor's device

Each traffic source to your website is recorded, capturing the IP address, device ID, and other identifiers. These details are then used to calculate a "fraud score" for the traffic source. If their behavior corresponds to any of the above irregularities, their fraud score increases. Once this score surpasses 7 (out of 10), we deem that source as invalid or potentially fraudulent.

These identified suspicious IP addresses are then added to the "IP exclusion list" in your Google Ads account almost in real time. You can view these by navigating to your Google Ads account.

These lists are updated frequently, and you can keep track of these changes in your "Change history" tab within your Google Ads account.

While our primary focus is Google Ads, we understand that your advertising efforts may extend beyond our platform.

For that reason, you can export the list of suspicious IP addresses directly from your Google Ads dashboard and import those to any other advertising channels you might be using, such as Bing Ads, Ad Roll, and more.

Leveraging Slaterock's Fraud Blocking Tool to Outsmart Competitors

In the competitive landscape of digital advertising, Slaterock's Fraud Block Tool serves as a powerful ally. Unscrupulous competitors may resort to underhand tactics such as repeatedly clicking on your ads to exhaust your budget, thereby diminishing your ad's visibility.

See how we saved this client over $900 in one month

Slaterock's tool is adept at recognizing such patterns and identifying the culprits. It assigns each traffic source a fraud score based on a series of suspicious behaviors, including excessively repetitive clicks.

Upon surpassing a predetermined threshold, the tool considers the source as potentially fraudulent. It then automatically adds these suspicious IP addresses associated with your competitors to your Google Ads account's "IP exclusion list".

This preemptive action ensures your ads are protected from your competitors' deceitful tactics, preserving your ad budget and maintaining the integrity of your campaigns.

Prevent Fraud Blocking Today

In conclusion, by applying these methods, we can effectively prevent your ads from serving to sources that are deemed invalid or potentially fraudulent.

Ensuring the integrity of your Google Ads campaigns not only optimizes your advertising budget but also enhances the overall performance and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. Stay vigilant, stay secure!

Looking for help getting started with Google Ads? Check out our Google Ads management services, where we cover your Google Ads project from top to bottom with targeted keywords, advanced bidding strategies, and competitor management.