Anchor Intelligence: How to protect against click fraud

Knowing what to look for in fraudulent clicks is the best place to start and that is where a new report from Anchor Intelligence comes in. The company has released "Anatomy of a Fraudster" to help marketers get a better grasp on click fraud by better identifying fraudulent clicks.

Their advice includes keeping a close eye on campaign variations from sudden traffic peaks to other strange occurrences and searching keywords to find out who competitors are and then add competitor ISPs to any IP exclusion lists available; marketers can even add their own ISPs to the exclusion lists to keep employees from clicking through too many times.

One of the most important things to do is to monitor the more expensive keywords very closely because these are somehow more vulnerable to fraudulent clicks.

Anchor Intelligence also suggests geographically targeting the campaign so that only North American (or an even smaller customer area) will count and scheduling ads for specific dayparts or days of the week so that it is easier to keep an eye on the traffic patterns.

Tags: Anchor Intelligence, click fraud, paid search, pay per click, PPC ads