The growth in click fraud and the telling signs to look out for when running ad campaigns

By Stewart Boutcher, CTO and Data Lead at Beacon

Click fraud – the practice of repeatedly clicking on an online advert with the intention of either generating revenue for the host website or draining revenue from the advertiser – has long been a substantial threat to digital marketers.

According to statistics published by Manchester Digital, advertisers lost an estimated $7.2 billion (£5.9 billion) globally to digital ad fraud – of which click fraud forms a major part – back in 2016.

Fast forward three years to 2019, and the picture looks even bleaker, with market research company eMarketer estimating at the time that online ad fraud was costing firms anywhere between $6.5 billion and $19 billion every year.

But in 2022, with a worldwide pandemic having greatly accelerated the shift towards digital marketing for many organisations, what is the current state of affairs when it comes to digital ad fraud, and what signs should advertisers be on the lookout for when running their campaigns online?

How has the pandemic affected click fraud levels?

Projections of the growth in click fraud over the course of 2022 certainly make for gloomy reading, with research from UK-based market analyst Juniper predicting that the total digital advertising spend lost to fraud could reach as high as $68 billion globally by the end of the year.

Further to this, Juniper’s data outlines the five countries that are likely to be impacted most by digital ad fraud, accounting for 60% of all losses. They are the United States, Japan, China, South Korea, and the UK.

While there are several reasons why levels of click fraud have grown so exponentially since 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic is unquestionably the most significant of all.

When the crisis hit, and mandatory lockdowns were imposed, the vast majority of people were cut off from their everyday routines, and were forced to adapt to the circumstances. With most stores closed, and people limiting their physical contact with others wherever possible, there was a huge shift from high-street shopping to online. According to data from Statista, about 40% of UK shoppers reported in March 2020 that they had been shopping more online compared to before the pandemic and, by February 2021, the figure had grown to around 75%. By contrast, the level of offline shopping decreased considerably, with about half of shoppers saying in January 2021 that they were spending less in-store as a result of the crisis.

Although the situation around Covid has improved significantly since then, with lockdowns having been lifted across the UK and people no longer legally obliged to self-isolate, the trend away from high-street shopping and towards online has continued, with a McKinsey report summarising that ‘the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours’, and in some cases ‘permanently’.

Due to the sea change in customer habits brought about by coronavirus, many marketers have responded by devoting far more of their budgets to digital marketing. While this is much more likely to generate sales than traditional forms of marketing, given how many people are now using the internet as their primary source of shopping, it also means that they are at a far greater risk of falling victim to click fraud.

As fraudsters have responded to the rise in digital marketing by doubling down on their efforts to drain revenues, the threat to companies advertising their products and services online is bigger than it has ever been. Because of this, digital marketers must be extra vigilant by keeping a lookout for the tell-tale signs that their campaigns are being sabotaged by click fraud, and take swift action to mitigate their losses.

Spotting signs of click fraud in your campaigns

Of course, in order to identify where click fraud might be taking place in your campaigns, you first need to know what signs to watch out for.

One of the biggest and most obvious signs of potential click fraud is a large volume of clicks that are failing to boost the number of sales you make. If there is an unusual amount of clicks in your campaign that are not delivering value, the chances are that there is something more menacing at play. Although it may not be enough evidence to definitively conclude that your campaign has been compromised, it is a warning sign that should prompt you to investigate further, nonetheless.

Another sign to be on the lookout for is when there is not a boost in the number of conversions your campaigns are generating. When studying the progress of a campaign, make sure to factor in the time of day or night when visitors are clicking on your ads the most. If you’re getting inundated for an hour or two at an earlier point of the day, this may be because a clickbot – a programme designed to carry out click fraud – has been deployed to exhaust your budget. Depending on the time of an attack, you may also be able to establish where it may have come from – many offshore fraud organisations, for example, are likely to click on your ads at strange hours of the day.

Furthermore, when monitoring your click data, you should ensure you take a close look at the habits of your visitors. If they are regularly filling up the shopping cart but never actually going through with the purchase, this could be a sign of click fraud. You may also see consumers browsing your webpage at random with no clear purpose. As the objective of a digital ad campaign is to boost your audience base and increase revenue, you will want to investigate any potential signs of click fraud as soon as possible, and take action to mitigate criminal activity if it is found to have taken place.

Help is at hand

While digital marketers certainly have the ability to identify signs of click fraud if they know what to look out for, making meaningful steps towards combatting fraudsters’ attempts to steal their budget can be a tall task by themselves alone.

As such, it is wise to seek professional help from an organisation committed to identifying and mitigating the damage inflicted by ad fraud. This can help you to get a clearer picture of how much click fraud is taking place in your campaigns, and take decisive action in blocking bots from interfering with your digital marketing efforts, thereby leading to more effective campaigns, less waste to your budget, and a far stronger Return on Investment [RoI].

With click fraud continuing to run rampant, and all signs indicating that the situation is only going to get worse, organisations need to be united in their fight against the fraudsters to guarantee their future prosperity in an increasingly digitised market.