Berlin, Germany Apr 20, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - Click fraud detection service Polygraph is warning advertisers about fake clicks from nefarious competitors.

The scam, known as competitor click fraud, occurs when competitors search for your business online and repeatedly click on your ads. This wastes your marketing budget, and reduces your websites online visibility.

Most click fraud happens on display websites run by criminals, said Trey Vanes, Polygraphs head of marketing. However, it can also happen when competitors try to waste your marketing budget by repeatedly clicking on your ads.

A common misconception amongst advertisers is the ad networks wont charge you for these fake clicks, but our research shows the clicks are considered valid as long as theyre spaced apart by a few minutes.

According to Vanes, the first thing advertisers need to do is to detect fake clicks.

Of course, its easy to detect fake clicks from your competitors when you use a click fraud detection service like Polygraph, however, there are two things you can do yourself if you want to see if your competitors are clicking on your ads.

The first thing to do is to list the IP addresses which have clicked on your ads, and see if there are any patterns, such as repeating IPs, or many IPs belonging to the same VPN company.

The second thing you can do is check to see if the same device fingerprints are repeatedly clicking on your ads. This is a powerful technique, as it looks beyond the IPs clicking on your ads, and detects the actual devices doing the fake clicks. Its likely your competitor is using the same few devices to click on your ads, so identifying their fingerprints makes it easy to see their click fraud.

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Vanes says there are four basic techniques for preventing competitor click fraud.

Once you have the proof your ads are being targeted by a competitor, the next thing to do is to make it difficult, or even impossible, for your competitor to click on your ads.

If the same IPs or IP ranges are generating the fake clicks, you can add them to your ad network's IP exclusions list, which will prevent anyone using those IPs from being able to see your ads. Dont overly rely on this technique, as most click fraud uses unique IP addresses.

There may be a pattern when it comes to what time your competitor is clicking on your ads. You can adjust your campaign's ad schedule to exclude those hours, so your competitor wont see your ads when hes online.

The next thing you can do is see if the IPs clicking on your ads share a common city or zip code. If so, you can use your ad network's location settings to ban the IPs in that location from being allowed to see your ads.

Finally, if your competitor is targeting the same ad keywords every time he searches for your business, you can remove those keywords from your campaigns, ideally by adding them as negative keywords, so your ads will no longer appear in his search results.

For more information about detecting and preventing click fraud, please visit https://polygraph.net

About Polygraph

Established in Berlin, Germany in 2021, Polygraph monitors the activities of click fraud gangs, including how they operate, who they target, the techniques they use, and how to detect their fraud. We go far beyond bot detection to ensure your ad budget is not stolen by cyber-criminals.