6. Geo-target your ads appropriately
If you do not sell products outside of North America, be sure to limit your geo-targeting to North America. If you do sell products abroad, monitor the performance of your international ads. If you find that your ads perform poorly in certain geographies, update your geo-targeting preferences accordingly. Keep a critical eye out for countries such as UAE, China, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. Anchor has seen relatively high volumes of fraud originating from IPs from these countries.
7. Use ad scheduling
Monitor the quality of your traffic according to time of day and day of the week. For instance, we find that humans typically use the internet during the day, while bots can run 24 hours a day. If you find that your conversion rates are higher in the mornings than late at night, you may want to daypart your bids to reduce your exposure to lower-converting traffic.
8. Report your findings to the ad network/search engine
Your ad network/search engine is not infallible. If you think you have identified fraudulent clicks, contact your customer service representative with specific data supporting your hypothesis. They want you to be satisfied with their service and will generally review the problem thoroughly in an effort to ensure that they are not billing you for invalid or fraudulent clicks. Be sure to provide your weblogs and highlight suspicious IP addresses, referrer URLs and page requests in order to facilitate investigations.
9. Encourage your ad network(s) to use third-party scoring solutions
Your ad network may not realize that you are concerned about click fraud. The more you and other advertisers ask networks to take additional steps to prevent and filter click fraud, the more likely these companies will be to proactively protect you. In particular, you should encourage your network(s) to engage the services of third-party traffic quality solutions providers. These third parties monitor the traffic quality within and across networks to help ensure that you see the highest possible ROI on your advertising spend while giving you confidence in the quality of your clicks.
10. Investigate your network
Before signing up with an ad network or search engine, do some research into its policies. For instance, you should determine whether the network uses frequency caps to prevent duplicate clicks originating from the same IP from being deducted from your balance. Also check to ensure that they are using the IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Bots List and not charging you for clicks from these robots. Finally, peruse their terms of use to determine the extent to which they care about the quality of traffic you receive. For example, look for restrictions against authorizing, encouraging or generating fraudulent clicks or impressions; editing, modifying, removing or obscuring ads; and displaying ads on error pages or "thank you" pages.
History has shown that the holidays are among the busiest time of the year for online fraudsters. By using these 10 tips for nipping holiday scrooges in the bud, advertisers can prevent fraud from consuming their valuable ad dollars. We, at Anchor Intelligence, wish you a joyous, profitable and fraud-free holiday season!
Ken Miller is CEO of Anchor Intelligence.
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