Pay Per click or PPC advertising is the most popular advertising tool used by internet
marketers. Google Adsense and Yahoo!Search Marketing are two most reputed PPC networks
online. The biggest advantage of PPC advertising is that payment is to be made only
when some visitor clicks on your ad and visits your website. It is a very cost effective
way to drive targeted traffic to your website and gives instant results. However, the  greatest threat to PPC advertising is click fraud. An estimate states that about 40% of
all clicks are fraudulent. This is more common in 2nd tier engines. Though the PPC
networks have their own systems to prevent click fraud, the following steps may be
taken to safeguard against such fraud:–

(a) When you start a PPC campaign, you must monitor it daily. Study the server logs to
find out whether there are multiple clicks originating from the same IP address.

(b) PPC is like gambling. So, never go for bulk investments. Set a fixed amount for each
day. Only spend what you can afford to lose.

(c) Never join a PPC company which allows the participation of incentive sites.   Incentive sites offer something free to the visitors for visiting the sites. Therefore,
clicks originating from such sites are usually not targeted. You may get a lot of clicks
but the conversion rate will be very low.

(d) The PPC network which you join must use a frequency cap. A frequency cap is a filter
which detects duplicate clicks originating from the same IP and prevents such clicks
from being deducted from your balance.

(e) Only show the ads in your target market. Many fraudulent clicks arise from some
east European and African countries. So you may reduce the risk of click fraud by  avoiding these countries.

(f) Many analytical tools are available in the market to detect click fraud. An example
is ‘Click Tracking Software’. Such tools may be used to protect yourself from fraudulent
clicks.

Why does Google’s AdsBot visit my advertisement landing page?

Google uses AdsBot to measure the quality of the ad landing pages. The content of the landing page will be used for the Quality Score that Google assigns to your ads.

Google uses the quality score and the amount you are willing to pay, to determine the position of your ads. Advertisement with a high quality score can rank higher, even if you pay less than others for the ad.

If you do not want that Google spiders these landing pages you can add the following robots.txt to your server:

User-agent: adsbot-google

Disallow: /

These commands forbid Adsbot-Google to crawl or index your web pages that you display for advertisement in Google search results. The bad thing about this however is that your AdWords quality score will drop and you certainly have to pay for it too. So you better forget to deny Adsbot-Google crawler access to your pages. Google AdWords landing pages and site quality guidelines are published on the AdWords pages of Google.

SEO Watch is specialized in online marketing and has many years of experience in the SEO world. SEO Watch has been involved in web development and marketing for 8 years in Asia and International and has helped several businesses to success.

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