Track false ad clicks, warn abusers and report click fraud with Who’s Clicking Who

When you increase your bid for a pay-per-click advertisement, chances are that someone will try to remove you from the top position without overbidding you. It's much simpler just to click on your ads, depleting your advertising funds. If you are advertising on other people's web sites, via so-called content or context advertising, you may be giving them a strong incentive to click on your ads on their own site. This increases their revenue – and your advertising costs. A new product called Who'sClickingWho may solve many of your click fraud problems.

Click Fraud is a huge problem. Google recently called click fraud "the single biggest threat" to their business model. Whether your competitors are clicking your ads on a regular basis, or fraudulent web publishers are having others click on your ads for them, chances are that at some point you have been the victim of some degree of click fraud. Some of our customers have discovered that 50% of their PPC budgets have been the result of fraudulent clicks.

Apart from click fraud, users may also be causing you extra costs by navigating to your site via your advertisments. Rather than bookmarking your website, users repeat the same search on Google and click on the ad they recognize on the right hand side each day. If you use Who'sClickingWho it will detect this behavior, and ask them to bookmark your website instead. This way, users will stop using the PPC ads to get to your site – an instant saving.

A simple solution to a nasty problem

It has previously been very difficult to separate bad clicks from good clicks, but now there's a simple solution to the increasing problem with click fraud. Who'sClickingWho saves you money by deterring bad clicks. The service tracks all of your clicks and provides you with data on repeat clickers.

When someone clicks on your PPC ads a specified number of times (you decide the threshold) a window will appear, telling them that you are watching them. You can customize this message to be as friendly, or as aggressive as you wish. When people realize they are being tracked, they normally stop.

Using advanced technology to report fraudulent clicks

The search engines themselves do track fraudulent clicks, but their controls are not terribly strict. If someone clicks on your ad five times in twenty seconds, you probably won’t be charged for all five clicks. But if someone clicks on your ads once or twice per day for a month, experience has shown that you probably will be charged for nearly every single click. Who'sClickingWho goes far beyond standard fraud controls by keeping track of all visits to your site for each user.

Who'sClickingWho even detects when someone is clicking on your ads repeatedly across several search engines, a protection you just can’t get otherwise. For example, if an abuser visits your site from Yahoo, Google, Enhance, Kanoodle, Miva and then twice from Looksmart, Who'sClickingWho will report that this user has visited your site seven times.

Having clicks originating from a foreign country that you receive no business from is often suspected fraud. With Who'sClickingWho, you know exactly where your clicks are coming from, down to the country, region, and even the city.

Detecting abusers coming from proxy servers has long been a difficult problem to overcome. Even the standard logs on your web server cannot detect and track individual users coming from the same IP address – but Who'sClickingWho can. WhosClickingWho detects AOL, Prodigy, and dial-up abusers who have multiple IP addresses. This enables you to catch abusers who are only clicking on your site once or twice a week to escape detection.

Search Engines may need proof that your repeated pay-per-clicks clicks are coming from the same user. Use the 3rd party data from Who'sClickingWho to approach your PPC company about refunds. The Auditing Tool in WhosClickingWho tracks individual users – and can be used to legitimately establish fraudulent activity. And the fact that your data is collected by an independent agency adds even greater weight to your complaint.

Start saving money now

If you are spending several hundred dollars or more per month on PPC advertising, we recommend that you use Who'sClickingWho. You may find that a single competitor is costing you hundreds of dollars every month. When you are free from abusers, you should monitor your clicks continuously so that you know when someone is trying to steal your money again.

To begin analyzing your advertisment clicks, all you need to do is install a small piece of Javascript on your landing page(s), and add tracking tags to your PPC listing URLs. WhosClickingWho is not stopped by pop-up blockers.