PPC fraud occurs when someone or automated bots clicks or views your ads fraudulently with the intent to waste your advertising budget or manipulate your campaign performance data for their own benefit or even gain competitive advantage over your business. Pay-Per-Click fraud is considered one of the cyber crimes that could dramatically affect a business growth. Fraudsters could be hired by a competitor to perform click farm which they manually search for your ads on every possible platform and click on, fill in the form and bypass the captcha, such activities look legit and it is hard for the ads platforms to prevent it. Another form of PPC fraud attack is through automated PPC bots, which automatically search for and click on your adds and automatically fill forms with bogus information.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) fraud can be executed through several methods and techniques, fraudsters start by gathering every possible information and keywords about your business to know the most possible keywords that are used in your ads, and to gather all your domains, emails, and platforms to target and affect all your campaigns, after they have all possible and verified information about your business, they can launch the PPC fraud attacks manually or automatically, in manual methods and techniques, they perform that by groups named Click Farms which they mostly have full-time job just searching and click on your ads associated with your domains and business, most of the time they use VPN or TOR connections to anonymize themselves and have their source anonymizing IPs changed in every new connection, by doing so it makes impossible for the effected business to block such fraudulent attempts. On the other hand, PPC fraud attacks could be done automatically which is way more detrimental, PPC fraud bots are sold on the dark web, it is automated scripts designed to perform searches and click on every possible ad campaign of the targeted business with legit user agents and manipulations to prevent search engines and social media platforms blocking their requests, the other more and more detrimental PPC fraud attack is through botnet attacks in which thousands of hacked devices are controlled by a CnC server to launch a PPC fraud attack against a company ad's campaigns.

PPC fraud can have a significant impact on your business's financial performance, as it can waste your advertising budget and reduce your return on investment (ROI). It can also negatively affect your campaign's performance data, leading to incorrect insights and decisions, and also affect internal company human resources of your marketing team.

Automated solutions can help detect and prevent some types of PPC fraud, they are not foolproof and may not be able to completely prevent all types of fraud. Human security monitoring, analysis and expertise are necessary to identify and address more complex and sophisticated fraudulent activities.

Some common types of PPC fraud attacks include click fraud, impression fraud, fake conversions, and fake leads. Click fraud is about repeatedly clicking on your ads to waste your budget, while impression fraud involves generating fake impressions to inflate your campaign's impression count. Fake conversions is generating fake conversions to inflate your conversion rate, while fake leads involve generating fake leads to waste your advertising budget and resources.

With our PPC fraud prevention service we use advanced and managed technology, proactive monitoring ,expert analysis to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks and impressions. We continuously monitor your campaigns to ensure maximum performance and minimize wasteful spend. Our digital marketing and SOC experts work together to provide robust protection against PPC fraud attacks.