The need to upgrade weapons in the war against click fraud has never been greater. Shifts in tactics from the fraudsters, from the blatant and crude, to the covert and sophisticated, have meant that advertisers are losing more money than ever to the malicious practice. Recent surveys of the damage PPC spamming has caused to advertisers make claims into the billions of dollars. Clearly, the current efforts by law enforcement, and Google themselves are ineffective against the problem of click fraud.

The Options

If the law can't help, and you can't rely on the search engines themselves to effectively police their services, it looks like your only option remaining is to fight it yourself. It is your advertising campaign, after all.

These days, the fraudulent clicker has an extensive arsenal of weaponry at their disposal to cause harm to an advertising campaign. VPNs, proxy servers, malicious software, and bots all make their detection and elimination increasingly difficult.

The perpetrators of online fraud have even enlisted vast armies of 'zombie' computers, unbeknownst to their rightful owners to provide thousands of fraudulent clicks for publishers of adverts, and competitors alike. The cost of such clicks soon ads up, damaging the ROI of the advertiser targeted.

Such diversification of the tactics of fraudsters makes simply analyzing reams of IP addresses and excluding ones that are repeat visitors without conversion an ineffective and time consuming strategy.

Isn't there an easier way?

Unfortunately, owing to the developing complexities of the fraudsters, policing your own advertising campaign for click fraud is an incredibly painstaking, and slow process. The difficulty involved and the margin for human error, when combined with the number of hours needed to analyze the data, would make the profitability of such a tactic questionable.

Effective Click Fraud Detection and Elimination

There exist a number of effective pieces of software on the market today to help combat the problem of unwanted clicks. Providers like ClickGuard make impressive claims regarding their successes at turning struggling online advertising campaigns around.

Using sophisticated parameters to compute all your click data, and automatically block suspicious IP addresses, devices, and users, companies specializing in click fraud reduction can really improve your advertising department's ROI.

There's already enough to worry about when trying to run a successful advertising campaign online these days without adding click fraud into the mix too. Getting a third-party to help fight the problem allows workers in the industry to get on with the more creative elements of campaign management, and apply their skills to areas more fitting to their talents.

This is of course great for employees, and even better for the company as a whole. Having someone else successfully eliminate unwanted clicks from your campaign could save you literally thousands.