7 Steps to STOP Click Fraud in Google Ads

In this video, I'm giving you seven tips to stop spam and bot traffic in your Google Ads account. And I'm also going to give you my number one recommendation that I believe stops most of it. So stay tuned to the end to get that. Let's dive in. Okay, number one, make sure you have search partners turned off. So if you're getting a lot of spam right now, that is normally one of the first places I look is is search partners turned on in my search campaign. So simply go into your search campaign, go to your campaign settings and inside of the settings you will find your networks. Here you want to make sure search network is not included. So if you see the blue check mark next to include Google search partners, you're going to want to make sure that's turned off. That's usually a big culprit of spam. If, if you're starting to get spam, number two is actually in the same settings of the campaign and that is this Display network settings. So this, if this blue check mark is next to include Google display network, you're going to want to make sure you turn that off as well. If you've watched any of my trainings before, you'll know I recommend never including Display Network as a setting in your search campaign. Is a search campaign, right? Search and display behave completely differently. Display Network on Google is an absolute sewer of garbage in my opinion. So I tread lightly with display campaigns to begin with. But including that in my opinion was a giant money grab by Google. And anytime I've seen a campaign with that turned on, especially if they have spam issues or buy bot traffic issues, usually if that's turned on, turning that off helps right away along with turning search network off. Okay, number three is if you're geo targeting a specific area. So if you're just targeting the United States or maybe you're targeting a specific state in the United States, you want to make sure you check your location settings. So we're going to go back into a search campaign setting and go into the locations here. Here. This campaign we're targeting the U.S. we've excluded some certain areas, but what you want to do is go to this location options and then here there's this setting called include what you want to make sure. And I teach this in my search campaign setups of all of my trainings. You want to make sure presence is checked, not presence or interest. When you have this setting on, you're allowing Google to open up the targeting to people they believe who are interested in your area. So what you can find is you get a lot of out of area traffic. So this is why you can see in like location reports for a campaign. You might be targeting the U.S. but you have this presence or interest setting on and you're like, why am I getting clicks from, you know, the UK and India and the Philippines and wherever else. Right. Well, it's because of this setting a lot of times. So make sure you have just presence on and you're going to want that saved if you have issues with specific countries. So let's say like in this case, India was a major culp. Culprit for us for a lot of like spam traffic. We also took the extra step of just excluding India in the location targeting. So if you go here, you can actually see India's is red where obviously us is blue. Blue's good, red's bad because we excluded red and we're targeting just the United States here. Okay, number four, make sure you're adding lots of negative keywords. So if you are not doing that, check your search term report. Make sure you're not getting a bunch of irrelevant traffic either. So I have an entire training on negative keywords, what they are, how to add them. That video will be in the description below. But negative keywords make sure you're on top of that. That can also be an issue not only of potential spam, but just irrelevant traffic in general. Okay, so I talked about the display setting, making sure that's turned off within a search campaign. However, if you're running display campaigns or performance max campaigns for for lead generation purposes, display is a big, big issue with spam and bot traffic. And performance max can be as well, especially for lead generation. Now I have a video already on how to stop spam specifically for Performance max campaigns specifically for lead generation. I will have that video for you in the description below if you want to go deeper on that. What I recommend, if you're running display or if you're running Performance Max for lead generation purposes, you will want to make sure you have a dedicated landing page for that traffic. So if they click that ad, you're sending them to a dedicated landing page that you now have quality control over. So you know the only traffic hitting that would be from those campaigns. You want to make sure you have recaptcha set up at minimum. Or like I teach in the video I just mentioned, I run a honey pot. So I break that down that there's like technical set up there. And so again the full video goes through step by step on how to do that. But a honeypot will make sure we weed out any spam leads that come through and we don't fire it as a conversion. So if you're getting spam or lots of bot traffic, make sure to check your display set up and your performance max campaign set up. And in my opinion, I always recommend if you're running display or performance max for lead generation purposes, dedicated landing page and then also having usury captcha or even a honey pot if needed if it's a really big issue. Number six, and honestly, this is the most important, you want to be optimizing your campaigns towards a high quality conversion. The accounts that I have audited or consulted with that have a lot of spam issues. Not always, but in most cases they are targeting really weak conversions. And what do I mean by that? Their landing page is a very simple form field and they have no recaptcha. They're not qualifying the leads through the backend process and they're not sending that data back into Google. So you know, bot traffic can easily even just fill these forms out, right? And then you end up in this infinite loophole of just continuing to feed back bad data to Google's machine learning. And if you're using smart bidding on bad conversion data, what does Google end up doing? It just gets you more bad conversions, right? However, if you have high quality conversion data, and I teach this in all of my trainings, when I talk about any sort of conversion tracking, setup or campaign builds, when you have high quality conversion data, you feed that back to Google's machine learning. Google finds you more high quality conversions. That's the feedback loop that you want and that's how you want to structure and build your campaigns. So in my opinion, the most important piece to weed out spam and bot traffic is building and architecting your account towards high quality conversions. And then Google will optimize around those high quality conversions. If this is how your account gets set up and you are optimizing on high quality conversions, you end up weeding out any of the spam or junk, at least from what I have found. So high quality conversions are absolute key to preventing any spam or bot. Now I'm not saying you're not going to get some bot traffic, right? I probably think that's impossible. However, if you are going and building the campaigns in a high quality manner with high quality conversion data, you usually won't end up with this problem. So make sure you're giving your campaigns and building the account around high quality conversions, then the last tip. And this is kind of like a last resort thing. I don't push a lot of people towards this. You know you can use click fraud software, third party tools, something like a Click Cease. I know there's a bunch of other ones out there. I'm not a huge fan of of those tools. Cause the business model just seems like very, you know, their marketing's very fearful. It's like as if everyone needs it. I don't believe that's the case. I do believe there's a use case for it. And again, go through all the steps I just laid out in this video. If you you're still having issues or you believe you're still having issues, you've got search partners turned off, no display network, you're adding lots of negative keywords, you have geotargeting to set up and sound. You have the present setting on. You're not using performance Max or display or if you are, you have dedicated landing pages that are built with high quality conversion data and you still have issues. Then go check out something like Click Cease or another click fraud software as a last resort. There you go. You now have seven tips to go through your account to make sure you stop any bot or spam traffic if you are having issues there. I hope you find the solution by implementing some of these recommendations. I'll see you on the next video.