Online Advertising Survival: Combating Click Fraud - University of ...

the powerful advertising networks. To most advertisers, an acceptable level of clickfraud is simply a cost of doing business. While the search engines claim to have theproblem well in hand, the burden rests squarely on the advertisers to be proactive indetecting and preventing click fraud.10.1 IP Address DuplicationAlthough there may be legitimate reasons, repeated clicks from the same IP address maybe a possible sign of click fraud and is most often the first step in the fraud identificationprocess.10.2 Review Performance DataLarge amounts of traffic with no new sales or leads may be an indication of click fraud.Rapid drops in conversion with corresponding increases in search traffic should bemonitored. Alternatively, there may be unexplained influxes in traffic for no specificreason. Perform return on investment trend analysis on a comparative daily, weekly ormonthly basis. Budgets should be developed for each advertising campaign to documentexpected results. Actual results should be compared to the baseline budgets. Optimizeyour keywords only to those producing a return on investment.10.3 Out of Country ClicksMonitor your clicks by country of origin. If there is significant traffic from countriesoutside of your market, it may be an indication of click fraud. A simple and effective37