How we protect

Our task is to quickly discover when bots are starting to click on your contextual advertising and disable them from seeing your Google.Ads advertisements immediately. Our protection is based on machine learning algorithms and mouse movement analysis.

HOW DOES A NEURAL NETWORK OPERATE?

CLICK FRAUD PROTECTION STAGES

WHO WE ALREADY CAUGHT

Every few minutes, we send data on suspicious visits (potential click fraud) to Google.Ads using API data to limit advertising for them. The information is transmitted 24/7 without user involvement. Who did we already block for our clients? Here is the actual data…

How does Clickfraud.dev detects fake traffic?

To detect fraud and protect your Google.Ads budget, we analyze data discrepancies and identify behavioral anomalies using a combination of real-time scoring, behavior analytics, device fingerprinting, and other techniques.

Data centres

Data centers are favored locations for malicious bot networks. Since data centers are secured locations where humans are usually not allowed access, traffic originating from a data center has a high likelihood of being a bot. For example, a session coming from an Amazon AWS data center address block is unlikely to be a valid human user.

Proxy services

Proxies are often used to obfuscate a user’s location or identity, allowing bot makers to obfuscate their traffic by “bouncing it” through residential IP- addresses. This traffic may appear to be from key markets like the US, Germany, or UK, but it is actually coming from countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. We maintain an internal blacklist of known proxy connection details and IP- addresses.

Behavioral anomalies

In order to detect non-human traffic, we measure, for example, the speed between clicks on a website. As bots are computer programs that perform repeatable actions, precise repetition of activity can be determined. Human users will have variances in click timing and patterns and will not act with inhuman precision. Another example is counting the number of clicks during a session. A deviation from normal human behavior can indicate that a user is a bot. When actions are performed by a script, the number of clicks can be extremely low or extremely high. This can indicate suspicious activity.

neural network

Cookie rotation

To avoid detection, fake traffic will rotate referrer cookies to appear human. If the same IP- address, or other identifiers, is recorded with multiple cookies, a high level of suspicion is assigned because the normal relationship between user and cookie would be one-to-one.

Automation tools

Fraudsters often deploy tools like Puppeteer or Selenium. These tools were originally created to help programmers test their work, but they make it simple to write bots that visit pages and click on ads.

Tor/known malicious bots & crawlers

Tor, short for The Onion Router, is a protocol for anonymizing web traffic. By using Tor, fraudsters can hide their location and usage information. In addition, we maintain a database of known malicious bots and crawlers.

We stop Google.Ads click fraud

Protect your PPC campaigns, save precious time and money. Boost your ROI with our protection & detection software.

get protection

01

Protect funds with automated fraud prevention

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Make sure your advertising results in genuine engagement

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Save time and drive advertising ROI up

How it works?

01 Monitor

We track every click on your site, collecting valuable data and information to gain insight into who is interacting with your Google.Ads. Crucially, our AI- algorithms separate real prospects – your potential new customers from fraudulent activity, web crawlers, and bots.

click fraud calculator

02 Detect

Harnessing the power of AI linked to up-to-date international blacklists and inbuilt quality checks, our powerful new protection system detects questionable clicks and hides targeted Google.Ads from the fraudster(s).

algorithms

03 Block

Once a fraudulent click is detected the Google.Ads will be hidden from the fraudster. Once you stop this invalid traffic, your enterprise will attract more customers and benefit from boosted sales – and reduced CPA (cost per action).

04 Reports

You will get detailed and easy-to-understand reports that are data-rich and updated in real-time, equipped with powerful search and filtering tools.

What is Google doing to prevent click fraud?

Google are transparent in their efforts to fight back against click fraud. But fraudulent clicks seem to be on the rise. So what can you do to safeguard your account from click fraud?

  1. They suspend and disable accounts found to be perpetrating click fraud.
  2. They have 180+ filters dedicated to weeding out these clicks in real-time.
  3. They blacklist IP addresses associated with this behavior.
  4. They retrospectively assess suspicious historical data and correct the record.
  5. They manually review suspected cases of click fraud raised by advertisers.
  6. They proactively work to identify and blacklist click-bots that haven’t triggered yet their signals.
  7. They reimburse the advertiser for all costs associated with the invalid clients that they’ve found.

How do you prevent click fraud?

Preventing click fraud is possible, but that doesn’t mean it is very easy. Below are four effective ways to make sure your Google.Ads campaigns are protected from the threat of this impacting your results.

Competitor Monitoring

In any digital advertising campaign, watching who you compete with in the search results is an important way to track your success. Keep in mind that in the online world, your competitor set can differ greatly from who you compete with offline. So be mindful of what domains you watch on a regular basis.

Limit Google.Ads visibility

The more control and customization you make to your advertising campaigns, the lower the likelihood that malicious attackers or competitors will be able to click on your ads and cause click fraud. Be sure to deploy advertising tactics like geo-targeting, long-tail search terms, and device targeting.

Campaign monitoring

The most successful PPC advertising campaigns are run with regular, daily maintenance. Being attentive to these campaigns can not only improve their performance but can also help you discover potential click fraud faster.

Use exclusion lists

if you Google.Ads campaigns are also running on the Google Display Network (GDN), make sure you have an accurate and extensive exclusion list to limit the visibility of your ads from low-quality or irrelevant websites to your target audience.

What to look for: anomalous behavior

  1. Keyword performance (words that normally don’t do well suddenly become very popular).
  2. An abnormal number of clicks from the same IP address (easy to identify but still popular form of click fraud).
  3. The decline in the number of conversions requires website cooperation (since fraudulent clicks don’t lead to purchases).
  4. Large numbers of visitors who leave your site quickly require website cooperation (many search engines require that the user who clicks on an ad spend at least 30 seconds on the landing page.
  5. A large number of impressions, without accompanying clicks on your ad (if ad impressions are inflated, but not clicked then Google can cancel your ad because the CTR is so small).
  6. Abnormally high clicks and impressions on affiliate websites (if an affiliate competitor is using click fraud, the search engine will notice high payments to the affiliate and may cancel the affiliate’s account).
  7. A large number of clicks coming from countries outside of your normal market area (use sites such as dnsstuff.com to identify which country an IP address is coming from).
  8. Accidental click fraud (link checking software or search engine robots may click on ads as they parse a page).

“Our team is rich with great software developers, analysts, mathematicians — responsible for machine learning algorithms detecting bots among all traffic. There is no magic to it, we put in great effort to provide such reliable protection for your advertising budget.”

Max Kulgin • CEO clickfraud.dev

our team

Say “goodbye” to click fraud.

Click fraud will waste ~20% of PPC advertisers’ budgets in 2021. Competitors and bots can click on your Gogle.Ads and waste your budget.