There’s plenty of money in advertising, and bots want a piece. As online advertising has risen in prominence and popularity among businesses, a side industry has grown as well to leech off the successes of ad campaigns. Bot-driven ad fraud, such as click fraud, is more and more common. These automated ad clicks can initially seem like a good thing—after all, the goal for a business is to have their ads clicked.

But these bots aren’t following through; they aren’t buying a product, or signing up for a service, or even providing real email addresses. Their goal is to click on ads, which leads to higher advertising costs for the business with fewer conversions, as well as skewed metrics.

Advertisers and marketers now need to be able to identify and mitigate bot-driven click fraud if they want to reach the right audiences, make data-driven decisions, and drive conversions. If click fraud is properly mitigated, a business can:

• Improve Lead Quality: By filtering out fraudulent clicks, companies can ensure that only legitimate clicks from genuine users are counted as leads. This improves the overall quality of leads generated from marketing campaigns.
• Increase Conversion Rates: With higher-quality leads, the likelihood of converting those leads into customers increases. Genuine leads are more likely to engage with your products or services, leading to improved conversion rates.
• Optimize Marketing Spend: By preventing fake leads, companies can ensure that marketing budgets are spent on reaching real potential customers rather than wasted on fraudulent clicks. This optimization of marketing spend can lead to better ROI and higher profitability for the business.

Signs of Bot-Driven Click Fraud

So what signs indicate your advertisements are being clicked on by bots, not humans? With click fraud, we see:

• Unusually high click-through rates (CTRs). A click-through rate is how advertisers measure the ratio of clicks to impressions—basically, how many people saw the ad, and how many then clicked it? The higher your CTR, the more you’re spending on that ad campaign. And if the CTR you are seeing is astronomical compared to the industry benchmarks, it’s very likely that bots are clicking on your ads.
• Diminished campaign performance and ROI despite high ad spend. If your CTR is artificially inflated due to click fraud, you will not see the return on your ad spend investment. So not only will you have fewer real potential conversions, your campaign will already cost more due to the artificial clicks.

Our downloadable checklist includes a comprehensive list of signs to look for to identify possible ad fraud.

Using DataDome Ad Protect to Detect & Prevent Bot-Driven Click Fraud

DataDome Ad Protect is built specifically to stop ad fraud, keeping your ad spend low and ROI high. Ad Protect:

• Reduces wasted ad spend by automatically detecting click fraud. We utilize multiple layers of machine learning techniques—such as signature-based detection, behavioral analysis, time series analysis, and more. Using these layers and the 5 trillion signals we detect daily distinguishes automated traffic from genuine user interactions with greater precision than any competitor in the market.
• Provides unbiased, transparent information on how click fraud is impacting your business. Customers are shocked to find that 5–35% of their ad traffic is bot-driven fraud that will never convert—which means wasted ad spend and skewed metrics.
• Detects more click fraud than manual efforts. DataDome Ad Protect detects over two times the fraudulent traffic compared to traditional tracking methods (such as spreadsheets).
• Helps you make informed decisions with the precision of our industry-leading bot and fraud detection. Over 300 businesses—including leading global enterprises—trust us to stop sophisticated attacks that could cost them millions. Fake leads result in poor campaign performance, drained marketing budgets, and time-consuming back and forth “clawbacks” with ad networks.

Because most online ad fraud is perpetrated by automated bot traffic, using a bot detection solution to optimize your marketing campaigns means you get protection on autopilot that is specifically made to stop bad bots. This can eliminate wasted ad spend, improve the results of marketing campaigns, and enhance the reliability of your analytics.

DataDome customers have experienced the positive impacts of Ad Protect firsthand: we detected some customer campaigns with more than 50% of traffic initiated by bots, and a popular UK travel agency that was dealing with 32% of ad campaign clicks originating from bots.

Discover the Power of Ad Protect

If you’re dealing with suspiciously high CTRs, low ROI, and diminished campaign performance, your marketing campaigns are likely being subjected to bot-driven ad fraud. In order to safeguard your ad spend, you need to detect and stop click fraud before they can skew your metrics or cost you for clicks that will not convert. Proactive detection and prevention measures will be cheaper and easier, in the long run, than trying to separate out bot traffic in a spreadsheet long after you’ve paid for the clicks.

DataDome Ad Protect is specifically designed to stop ad fraud and protect marketing teams from wasted spend. Learn more about how DataDome can protect your marketing campaigns and ensure your ads are being clicked on by real humans.