This post continues the introduction to click fraud series, and discusses competitor click fraud.
Competitor click fraud occurs when your direct competitors click on your ads in an attempt to place their own ads more highly. This in turn gives them a better opportunity to sell their services or goods.
This type of click fraud, as the name suggests is committed by your competitors. This does not necessarily mean your traditional bricks and mortar competitors who do business in the same sector and often the same location as you. It is more likely that competitor click fraud is committed by organizations who are bidding on the same keywords as you.
Your competitor will repeatedly click on your ads in an effort to deplete your daily advertising budget. This will then allow their own ads to appear without competition, often at a much reduced bid price as they will not have to match your maximum cost per click to occupy the same position you had.
In an effort to reduce your exposure to competitor click fraud, you should know who your competitors are, and then add them to your pay per click campaigns exclusion list.
To find out who your keyword competitors are is a simple, but manual task. Simply enter your keywords into your search engine of choice and record the sites which are displayed. Repeat this at different times of the day to ensure you capture competitors running ads in different time zones.
The next step is to identify the IP address range of your competitors. Using a tool such as whois from the various top level internet companies such as InterNIC or RIPE you can resolve which IP ranges a company holds. Alternatively if you have suspicions about clicks from particular IP addresses from your web server logs, these can be resolved using the following tool http://www.arin.net/whois/.
Once you have your competitors IP address range, exclude them from seeing your ads. This is a function of most of the major search engines; the tools are available inside your account admin console.
A caveat must be added to this statement. You will only exclude your competitors if they are clicking on your ads manually from within their corporate firewall. If they click on ads from their home PC or an internet café, then they will still have access to your ads. If you throw more malicious methods such as click farms and click bots (discussed later in this series) into the mix, then baring competitors through IP exclusion should be one of a larger arsenal of low quality click protection methods.
The next article in this series will detail click bots.
Other posts in the series:
Neil Matthews is an independent click quality consultant, details of his work can be seen at www.clickqualityconsultant.com