How To Detect Click Bot Activity On Your PPC Campaigns

Abisola Tanzako | Feb 22, 2023

Click bots have advanced significantly over the past few years., and have remained a huge pain in the PPC industry. 

Click bots, through their activity, have an annual cost to marketers that exceeds $35 billion and is still rising. In 2020, click fraud losses on PPC marketing managers totaled $23.7 billion.

Click bot activity has, over time, been utilized by fraudsters. Based on the knowledge that an average bot is a simple piece of software that they can program an average bot to carry out their click fraud activity or task.

On the other hand, not all web bots serve or carry out malicious purposes, like click bots. Click bots are primarily used to drive erroneous traffic through clicks to websites with only a few sequences of clicks in succession.

By simply visiting a website and clicking on an ad, an icon, or another sort of hyperlink, click bots can significantly impact your site’s performance, skewing metrics and wasting a significant portion of your ad budget. 

These click bots intend to deceive a website or service into believing that real people are interacting with advertisements or webpages; clicking on them provides marketers with misleading information.

What Is Click Bot Activity?

Clicking on buttons, leaving spam comments, or visiting websites are all examples of click-bot activity (bot traffic). They also engage in targeted click fraud, such as click spamming, click injection or injection within an app.

Bots hide on a device (often without the device owner’s knowledge); they are malware or Botnets most frequently found implanted on computers or laptops, tablets, websites, or mobile phones and are utilized as a network component to click on several ads.

Fraudsters use this automatic ad-clicking system to click on ads maliciously. 

How To Detect Click Bot Activity

The first step in stopping a click bot from destroying your PPC campaigns and ad budget is detecting it. 

With effective click-bot activity detection in today’s internet environment, where both the Bots are getting smarter, you may be aware that your PPC campaigns and advertisements are being targeted.

For effective bot prevention and reduction, detecting bot activity is essential. Your PPC campaign spending will be maximzed when malicious bots are prevented from accessing your websites, web applications, and APIs.

Irregular Spick In Traffic Form Unkown Regions

Any unexpected rise in the number of clicks (high conversion) made by viewers, followers, or users from a certain area, nation, city, or other location that is unfamiliar to you or unrelated to your website indicates click-bot activity.

Additionally, the fact that the region from where your website receives these visitors does not speak and comprehend the language your website is written in indicates that click bots are attacking your website.

High Bounce Rate

Search engines classify a visit as a “bounce” when a visitor leaves a website without viewing subsequent pages or engaging in other extra actions or interactions with the page. Fraudsters exploit this to their advantage to deplete PPC marketers’ advertising budgets using click bots.

Generally speaking, bots move quickly, allowing them to complete many click activities in only a few seconds. Therefore, it takes only a few seconds for click bots to browse every page of your website and click on every link they require.

This bounce rate counts the number of visitors who land on a single website page before clicking anywhere further on the page. Therefore, unexpectedly higher bounce rates are a sign of a click bots assault.

Rise In Junk Conversion

You’re dealing with a click bot if a bot is very engaged on your website but then exits immediately after clicking. However, these actions are indicated by a strange rise in account creation or sign-ups with strange email addresses.

Therefore, when experiencing an increased signup inputs from users and followers, or customers who repeatedly enter products in their shopping carts without actually purchasing them, these might be signs of a click-bot operation.

Unexpectedly High Page Views

Another indication of bot activity is unexpectedly high page views, which may be seen utilizing monitors that regularly chart cumulative page views.

An excellent place to start is by watching and reviewing Google Analytics data for any irregularities in the number of visitors to your website. by looking at the volume of page visits, the volume of referrals, and the average session length.

You can quickly determine whether or not bots are accessing and clicking on your website and how frequently by evaluating this to your typical consistent record. You may also use the IP addresses listed in your frequent visitor logs to run a click-bot detection check.

Irregular Session Duration

The amount of time a user spends on your website is another excellent indicator of click-bot activity. Sessions that last less than a few seconds on average are alarming; a sudden decrease in session time may be the consequence of bots clicking the site’s pages much more quickly than a human visitor would.

Humans typically stay on a page for at least a few seconds but hardly for longer than a few minutes. You’ll be able to spot click-bot activity by having a look out for unusual session duration patterns in your analytics program.

Click Bot Detection Software

Clickbot activity can also be detected using click-bot or click fraud detection software such as ClickPatrol. Manual click bot detection effectively blocks your PPC campaigns from automated clicks that can drain your campaign budget. However, they can be difficult and time-consuming.

With click bot detection software, you can track every click stream generated by your website. This software is a third-party tool that monitors and protects your PPC campaign by blocking unusual activities.

Furthermore, this software analyzes which clicks do not meet the configuration requirements added to the Google Ads campaign. They basically notify you of fraudulent clicks by coordinating with Analytics to detect all the inconsistencies on your site. 

Conclusion

Click Bot activity is the term used to describe clicks, signups, or conversions made on your PPC adverts by automated software (bots). These click bots can engage in a staggering quantity of click fraud in a relatively short period.

Despite numerous attempts to halt the issue, click fraud committed by click bot Apps and software continues to be a concern for marketers. 

However, click-bot activity will be easy to identify and avoid using the procedures mentioned above.

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