How Click Fraud software improves paid advertising
It is estimated that half of all internet traffic is attributed to bots and the malicious ones can work to divert visitors or steal clicks from paid ads. This article explains how click fraud impacts on your digital advertising and how click fraud software works to block the bots and improve paid advertising performance.
The problem with bots
1 – It’s a hidden problem
Bots can account for a substantial portion of all traffic from paid digital ads (PPC and promoted social posts), often up to 30% and, in some cases, in excess of 60%.
Statistics such as these help illustrate the scale upon which ad fraud is carried out and show that bots are increasingly becoming a reality that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore.
2 – Wasted ad spend
An advertiser spending, for example, £100,000 per month on Google and Facebook could be wasting around £50,000 during that period on fake clicks.
With Veracity capable of achieving as much as a 60% reduction in bot traffic, the advertiser would stand to save £30,000 of wasted ad spend a month.
These are significant amounts of ad spend that can be saved simply by having Veracity’s Click Fraud software protection in place.
3 – Inaccurate campaign data
The need for better data is illustrated by the Gartner Marketing Data and Analytics Survey 2020, which found that, despite CMOs prioritising investments in marketing data and analytics, more than half of senior marketing leaders are disappointed by the results they receive from their analytics investments.
As a result, only 54% of marketing decisions are being influenced by analytics, with respondents citing poor data quality, a lack of results that can be acted on, and nebulous recommendations as the top reasons why they do not rely on analytics to make decisions.
However, having access to reliable analytics can be a true game changer for businesses, and can help them to adapt their marketing strategy accordingly.
The skewed campaign data that click fraud helps create can have a hugely detrimental impact on a marketer’s campaign budget and strategy.
Businesses need accurate data to make informed decisions regarding sales, production, reached target audience, and more.
How Veracity improves paid ad performance
Veracity’s Click Fraud software improves paid advertising and helps protect marketers digital campaigns from malicious bots and ad fraud.
The Veracity platform was created to achieve this goal, and it does so by identifying the presence of click bots – automated programs used to commit ad fraud – within campaigns, and takes steps to block these programs.
This means marketers receive higher-quality, more accurate data that allows for better decision making on key factors that will help their business to succeed and grow.
Four reasons why Veracity is the best click fraud solution
- Multi-channel bot detection
Veracity detects invalid clicks across many major paid media channels, including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, Instagram, as well as programmatic/display advertising.
- Award-winning technology
While ad-verification and click fraud prevention platforms typically rely on a limited number of indicators and potentially out of date ‘blacklist’ IP lists to detect bots, Veracity uses Digital Journey Tracking to collate all visitor actions and uses this data for individual visitor behavioural and network analysis, as well as looking at dozens of parameters to perform advanced OS/device fingerprinting.
It is for this technology and Veracity’s Veracity project with Innovate UK – the UK’s innovation agency – that Veracity recently won the Tech Nation Rising Starts 3.0 Cyber Award and the Prolific North Tech Award for Best Marketing Technology Innovation.
- It blocks bots on paid search and social
Veracity blocks bots on Google search ads, shopping ads, display ads, Microsoft ads and ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Once a bot is detected, Veracity ensures that the device fingerprint is added to its unique bot protection database. This database is used to block bot impressions and clicks on paid campaigns. Veracity uses this to build regularly-updated, custom blended bot exclusion lists specifically for the client, giving them the maximum reduction in click fraud over time.
Because bots come and go gradually to help them evade detection, the platform only considers a bot fingerprint valid for a limited time to avoid over-blocking.
Veracity prides itself on being a champion of transparent marketing data, and with click fraud protection and mitigation across search and social, it feeds other parts of the Martech stack with better quality data, enabling improved analytics, decision-making and results.
- Accurate marketing analytics
Veracity brings all your campaign data into one easy-to-use platform – from Google Ads, Social PPC and email marketing.
With Veracity you can:
See the website analytics for actual human visitors only (not skewed by bot visits).
See all your marketing campaign website traffic from any online channel.
Produce attractive reports in the platform or integrate with Google Data Studio.
Identify and combat bot clicks and fraudulent website traffic to help you optimise your campaigns for more human visitors.
Analyse the website visitor behaviour enabling you to see what campaigns are driving engaged users.
Measure Cost Per Visit (CPV) and Cost Per Lead (CPL) to give marketers a true view of how their digital campaigns and channels are performing.
See the SEO Lighthouse score of all website pages.
About Veracity
Get started with Veracity by taking advantage of a free traffic audit on your paid campaigns.
With click fraud detection and mitigation across search and social, Veracity feeds other parts of the Martech stack with better quality data, to enable improved analytics, decision-making and results.
For this digital agency client, Veracity detected bot activity on the campaigns at an average of 28% and this reduced to 16% bot activity just two weeks into using Veracity following the traffic audit.
That’s 12% more humans engaging with their ads, resulting in an uplift in conversions and 25% increase in cost per visitor.
