Click fraud is becoming an ever increasing problem with pay per click search engine marketing. To define it simply, click fraud occurs when a person or automated computer program imitates a legitimate web browser by clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating fraudulent charges per click. There are a multitude of reasons why this may occur, such as competitors attempting to gain an upper hand, to the more likely scenario, which is website properties attempting to increase their commissions by generating bogus clicks from their sites. The purpose of this article is not to discuss how or why this is occurring, but rather what you as an advertiser can do to combat it.

Now what I am going to tell you is not rocket science, but a surprising number of advertisers fail to employ the most simple and effective of tools to mitigate their risk click tracking. Most site owners who spend any serious amount of money in the form of pay per click advertising usually take the step to install conversion counting code on their sites, whether its the free stuff from Yahoo! or Google, to more sophisticated third party tracking tools.

The problem for many advertisers, is that although they may be tracking conversions and managing their pay per click campaigns with automated bidding tools, many, if not most of these tools lack the tracking data that allows the site owner to see details down to the click level, such as time of click, referring URL, IP address of the click, etc Although many click fraud perpetrators employ tactics that hide or mask some of this data, such as IP address, having the ability to see this data can point out potential problems and allow you to nip it before it gets too far out of control.

Let me give you an example. Lets say that you see traffic has picked up on a particular word that has been performing well historically for you, but conversions have not increased proportionately. An analysis of your click tracking logs may show an abundance of traffic spaced apart in fixed intervals, say every 10 minutes, or a particularly strange URL referring the traffic to your site. Data such as this can clearly point out a click fraud problem that may be occurring because of your bidding position, for example. Click fraud perpetrators love to target high cost per click ads showing in the top 3 positions. This particular keyword may have performed well in the 4th or 5th positions, but above this, you may find that it is a target for fraud.

Now if you are running an automated bid management program, you may argue that with decreasing conversions, your ad may be adjusted out of such a position in the example I just gave. Although this may be true, without the specific details of the clicks, you may have no idea as to why words are not performing well in certain positions, and you may not have the ammunition necessary to present your case to the search engines for a fraud investigation to occur. Without the knowledge of when and where your clicks are coming from, you are running a campaign with your eyes only half open.

The limited space in this forum does not allow us to go over the multitude of examples of how specific click tracking data can help you ferret out click fraud. However, the point here it to illustrate just how monitoring this kind of data can help you fight the kind of fraud that is occurring that can chip away at your precious advertising dollars and impact your ROI.

There are a number of products on the market that can help you analyze this data. If you are managing your own campaigns, you will find that it is an investment well spent. If you are outsourcing your pay per click advertising to a professional management company, then you should make sure that this data is available and analyzed by your account managers on a regular basis.