How you can save your ad from invalid traffic?

Invalid traffic has become a worldwide problem for marketers. All publishers and marketers (including you), are getting some amount of invalid traffic and clicks on their websites, irrespective of size and niche. If I talk about China then China’s total advertising traffic involved 30% of invalid traffic in 2018. Likewise, the US also had a fourth-highest fraud rate as 17% of ads were visited by non-human traffic.

But the truth is that no one can entirely obliterate this invalid traffic form their sites. However, as a website owner, you need some bots or search engine bots to crawl your website. Nevertheless, you can certainly work on preventing your website from getting the invalid traffic, clicks, or impressions.

Understanding the concept of Invalid Traffic is a must

Invalid traffic includes any suspicious clicks or impressions that result in increasing the publisher’s income or advertiser’s costs. Invalid traffic is considered fraudulent traffic as well as accidental clicks.

Google AdSense definition of Invalid Traffic, “Invalid Traffic includes any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate advertiser’s costs or publisher’s earnings”.

Reasons behind getting invalid traffic: many publishers click on their own ads, provoke others to click on ads to create the fake traffic, automated traffic tools or traffic sources, robots, or other deceptive software, etc. Many fraudsters use bot traffic to spam the web page and steal user’s data.

Advertiser’s perspective on Invalid Traffic

Let me tell you, folks, there are many users who keep clicking all the ads shown on the screen with the intention of fraud. In this case, these clicks and impressions have no actual value. And from the perspective of advertisers, such traffic doesn’t yield good leads and it makes the impressions and clicks worthless and of no use.

You also need to know that Google is charging the advertisers for their ads to be shown. Now, it is Google’s responsibility to provide targeted traffic/clicks to their products and services. Google has more advanced tracking algorithms. 

Some effective tips to save your ads from Invalid Traffic

Getting invalid traffic is not at all good for anyone. Fake clicks and impressions increase the cost of advertisers. Too much of non-converting traffic can reduce the market value of a publisher’s inventory. Thence, when you observe suspicious traffic such as a sudden increase in users or spam comments, it’s good if you take action immediately which includes:

– Identify your traffic and users

Segment your audience based on channels, locations, device usage and more. Google Analytics tool can also help you with the same. You can see the sudden alteration in the number of users or suspicious user behavior. Next, you need to look at the metrics like average session duration and page scroll depth. Keep informing yourself is the first step in preventing invalid traffic.

– Never click on your own Ads

Yes, you must not click on your own ads and also don’t ask your friends or relatives to do the same. Google AdSense has a very strict policy for invalid clicks on ads. Google can easily identify if a publisher clicks his own ad. In this case, Google might disable your AdSense account. If unintentionally you click on your own ad then you can inform Google.

– Don’t purchase traffic

Purchased traffic is never good for your brand or company as it mostly consists of click farms where computer software or humans are assigned to provide clicks and impressions. And once your subscription ends with the traffic provider, you will be down to low or no traffic at all. So, you must rather invest in better content, user experience, and search engine optimization to organically increase traffic.

– Pursue best practices for AD placement

I know many marketers try to induce users to click on their ads by mistake which is also considered as fraud. You must make sure that your ads are not disrupting the user’s experience. If required take help from ad viewability best practices.

– Use Plugins to prevent invalid click activity

You will find many Plugins and Tools to prevent invalid clicks and impressions activity on your blog or website. With the help of plugins, you can block specific countries where you’re getting invalid traffic from. Google Ad Manager (GAM) is an ad management tool that supports filtering countries and shows ads.

Putting it all together   

Google loves high-quality websites to do business and provide good value to the advertisers. You must hire ad fraud protection agencies that simply help you eliminate or block publishers with suspicious traffic. Let me also tell you that Google gives too much importance to the policy and guidelines which you have to follow anyhow.

If you are caught in any case or fraud activity, your account or website will be suspended. It doesn’t matter whose mistake it was. So be careful in getting traffic to your website. Hence, publishers are required to follow the above-mentioned tips to avoid invalid traffic.

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