So, you decide your business could do with a greater online presence. You do your research and find Google AdWords. Sounds great, right? Sounds like exactly the kind of tool you need to take your company (and earnings) to the next level. You read the material, you watch the Youtube tutorials. You put in the hours to make sure you understand what you are getting involved in and you decide to give it a go.

You sign up, set a budget, choose some keywords, link up your landing pages, and bid on your chosen keywords. All you can do now is hope, and wait.

The opening of your campaign goes pretty well. Your advertisement receives clicks. Of these clicks one or two actually make a purchase. Great! This is all going swimmingly.

You crunch the numbers to see if it was worth it. You work out if the cost of each click to your company is worth the one or two sales you have made. It's still early days for your campaign but your calculations show that you're in the black. Fantastic. This is working.

Things Can Turn Sour. Fast.

A week or two goes by and you notice your progress begins to struggle. You see that there is still a pretty high volume of clicks on your advertisement, the difference now being that you are seeing far fewer conversions. You begin to panic.

'Each click is costing me money and returning nothing!'

What's going wrong? This is not the way you envisioned your campaign going.

You're forced to increase your daily advertising budget in the hope that the additional exposure will lead to more conversions. Another week goes by, and still your campaign appears stalled. The campaign is now costing much more than you wanted it to and is not pulling in the customers to make it all worth it.

If all this sounds familiar, you are likely the victim of click fraud, or PPC spamming.

Click Fraud itself refers to any unwanted clicks on an advertising campaign. These can come from a variety of different sources including competitors seeking to drive up your advertising budget and drive you out of the market, and publishers trying to get a larger payout for publishing your advert in the first place. Either way, the bottom line is the same. It costs you cash.

Saving Your Advertising Budget?

Unfortunately, Google themselves are unlikely to help. They merely rent you the space to advertise. It's like traditional advertising. You can't exactly sue the council if someone defaces your billboard can you? They just rented you the space. They weren't responsible for the malicious act of vandalism. This is the attitude that Google takes on the issue.

However, click fraud still costing you money. It is still eating into your advertising budget and still affecting your ability to sell your product or service.

The only real solution is to fight it yourself. To arm your business against malicious clickers who want to bleed you dry for whatever reason.

Enter ClickGuard, a professional software solution for combating click fraud and helping businesses to only receive 'interest' from legitimate customers. Using a highly sophisticated set of parameters, ClickGuard analyzes the clicks your ad receives and identifies the suspected fraudsters. It can then automatically block known culprits, or limit the number of times a given user can even see your advert.

Third party software providers like ClickGuard allow you to get on with actually running your business, rather than wasting countless hours worrying about your campaign, and attempting to spot and block individual IP addresses yourself.