In the programmatic ecosystem, every form of digital ad fraud impacts all the players in a varied manner; irrespective of whether you are an advertiser or a publisher. Click Spamming is no different.
As seen previously, click spam can be automated or manually performed. High traffic with low conversions is a give-away that something is fishy in the background. However, before the publisher can understand and take an action, Google immediately retaliates, leaving less room for publishers to figure a way out.
Let’s understand how critical is click spamming for a publisher’s reputation in the programmatic ad market.
Consequences of Click Spam
1. Temporary Suspension or Life Ban of AdX Account
Once Google notices that a specific publisher is experiencing indifferent insights concerning website traffic, it may temporarily suspend the publisher’s AdX Account or may impose a lifetime ban on the same.
This means that you lose access to various high-ticket Google advertisers and as a result of the ban, you shall not be allowed to open new accounts. Moreover, reinstating your AdX account can take a while as you are required to submit an invalid activity appeal form with Google. This is investigated in detail and a final decision for reinstating your account is subsequently taken.
2. Revenue Loss
Click Spam depletes a publisher’s ad inventory. High engagements with low conversions may force the algorithm to place low-bidding advertisers against your ad inventory. Thus, this reduces the opportunity to receive the best CPM rate from quality advertisers. Eventually, the publishers experience a constant loss of revenue.
Moreover, in case of temporary suspension of AdSense accounts, publishers miss out on a chance to earn using their premium inventory during the stipulated period.
3. Low-quality inventories
Google’s algorithm reduces the dependency on publishers whose inventories are infiltrated by click spams and fraudulent clicks. It pushes low-bidding advertisers against such publishers which prevents your chance of securing a high-ticket advertiser.
4. Reduced Bids from Advertisers
Fraudulent clicks resulting from spam exhaust the advertiser’s campaign budget and unnecessarily increases the cost. Moreover, a low conversion rate also forces such advertisers to draw a boundary with the publishers who fail to produce beneficial results. Thus, there are high chances of reputed brands not bidding for a publisher’s ad inventory which in turn damages their reputation.
Now that sounds troublesome. Being cautious 24/7 regarding each click on a manual basis seems close to impossible. In that case, is there a concrete solution to address this click spam issue?
With ClearTrust, yes!
SafePIXEL: The end-to-end Click Spam Detection Software
At ClearTrust, we offer a Click Spam monitoring and blocking solution named SafePIXEL.
This solution offers the following:
- Identify Invalid Traffic
- Identify Click Spam
- Identify Click Farm generated clicks. These could be competition clicks.
- Identify Sophisticated Traffic Generator clicks.
- Identify Accidental Clicks
- Identify Duplicate Clicks
It is an asynchronous solution so it does not add any latency or cause any issues with the page loads. It also does not control or regulate ad refreshes. This solution comes in two variants
- AdUnit Monitoring
- AdUnit Monitoring & Ad Blocking
It’s recommended to start with Monitoring and then enable Blocking.
Seems safe enough? Get in touch with us for further details and to test this software yourself.
