Click Fraud in Google Ads: How to Protect Your Account and Budget

Click fraud, the biggest problem of modern advertisers. Because when you spend on Google Ads some real money, you want to understand this actual budget that you spent, it was invested in showing your ads to your potential clients, to your potential buyers. But quite often when you check your data log or information about leads in your business, you can see that some amount of them, and sometimes it's even about half of the leads, half of the visits to your websites, are from bots, from fake destinations, from fake leads, spam leads, whatsoever. And you realize that you actually spent half or even more of your budget to show your ads to somebody who just artificial, not even a real customer. In this video, I'm going to show you the exact service that can help you avoid click fraud at absolutely new level. Why I say new level? Because if we want to understand how click fraud has developed through the years, we can see that like initially the biggest problem was the fake impressions. When advertisers, like 10 years ago, when advertisers paid mostly on paper impression model, it was quite a large problem related to fake impressions, to the bots. And there were two big companies, DoubleVerify and IAS, who actually managed to solve this problem. And both of these companies are public now and they work with extremely large advertisers, with enterprise-level advertisers. Then we had second step of this problem, click fraud. When your competitors clicked on your ads in order to spend your budget. And again, we had a variety of services, of tools that can help you to reduce or completely even avoid the click fraud. But last year we observed absolutely new problem. When bots not only click on your ads, but they are also complete the form on your website. They fill the form and they create you a lead. And you can see after your sales team call to these leads or contact these leads that half of them, the numbers don't exist, the emails don't exist. But even if somebody answers to this call, they say, "No, we didn't fill any form. It's a mistake." So the newest problem is about not only impressions, clicks, but about fake leads. Spam leads that pollute your funnel and interfere the learning of algorithm inside Google Ads platform. I had this problem in my business as well. And finally, half a year ago, I found the solution. The solution is the tool Kale AI. This tool can, first of all, this tool can show you, so you install this tool on your website. It analyzes all forms on your websites and gives you quite detailed report. About total amount of leads, but the most important report is about ratio qualified to new leads. And you can see in my case, the orange line indicates the trend line. Over the last 5 months, quality of my leads was increasing from day to day. Every single month I've seen a higher and higher percentage of real leads in my funnel. So for me, it's the best evidence that this system works. So what this particular tool does? It accumulates information about email, phone number, and IP, and other details from person or from user who filled the form. It enhanced information about email Does this email exist? Is it works? And so on. About phone number, which carrier, which type, which location, which information about this number can we receive. And information about IP address, browser, and so on, so on. Information about browser details inside user. And information about the user that the script received from the browser. After this system just compares the dots, just links the dots. And trying to find some relationships that can confirm or reject the quality of lead. So KLEI gives you exact lead score, the probability, the number out of 100 that this particular lead is real. So first of all, even before calling the person, you can understand Does this person worth calling at all? Like, is it real? And the most interesting part, after you've— you or your sales team, let's say somebody ordered the plumber service, you call or your sales team call to this person and the person rejects. The person says, no, I've never ordered any plumber services. In this case, you press reject and KLEI prevents sending this data to the Google Ads. If you press confirm, this data sends to Google Ads. It helps us to feed Google Ads only with quality leads data. But the most interesting part in context menu where you can actually, for every single lead that you previously confirmed, you can send to Google Ads data about the value of this lead. You can set, for example, let's say this particular lead previously confirmed that he needs plumbing services. Then we did him some service and he paid us $1,300. This lead paid us $200 and this lead paid us $30,000. We did for him, let's say, whole bathroom renovation. We can return these values to the Google Ads by pressing Confirm Purchase. And thanks to this, in Google Ads, we can see which particular campaign, ad group, ad, search term, keyword, audience, demographic, and so on, which exact ad brought us this particular lead. And we can make decisions inside our Google Ads based on actual real value, not only on the amount of leads and cost per lead. I use this tool a lot in my own project and in my clients' projects. How to apply IP exclusions in Google Ads? If you want to protect your ads from fraudulent activity or from your own employees, I will show you step-by-step technique how to determine the exact IPs and how to exclude them from serving your ads.

Igor Levitsky, Dr. Ads, PhD, the Young Scientist of the Year in Ukraine. Since 2006, he has been applying mathematics to optimize Google Ads. Named Europe's best PPC speaker by Ads World Experience. One of the leading Google Ads experts in the world. A professional educator. Over 4,000 entrepreneurs have increased their sales after taking his courses. A practicing expert, Igor's clients generate $50 million in profit from Google Ads each month.

So, first question: why should we exclude somebody from our ads? There are two answers. First answer: there are some lazy employees for whom the easiest way to find some product or service in their own company is to Google it when they just need to find some page on their website, they just usually put the search term in Google Ads and click on the first link. And very often the first link is your search ad from your brand or DCA campaign. In some cases, there are more clicks from the employees, from the team, from the branches than from actual users. And of course, you don't want to waste your advertising budget on your team because they already aware about services that you serve. So how to exclude your employees, your team, your branches, your home from Google Ads? The easiest step is to go to whatismyip.com website, and this website just shows your actual IP, my public IPv4. Just copy this IP and paste it in IP exclusions and press save. That's it. Next, send this link via Messenger, WhatsApp, or whatever to your employees to your branches, to your partners, and ask them to share with you their IP addresses. Put all of these IP addresses into IP exclusions panel and press save. After this, you will never waste your advertising budget on your employees or your partners. Next question is more complicated. What if somebody wants to click fraud me? What if my competitor just click on my ads from different devices, from different laptops, from different users and waste my budget on these clicks. I will show you how to determine exact IP addresses. I'm taking 32 seconds to share something important with you so you can stop wasting your ad budget. I've managed over $700 million in Google Ads, so all my insights are tested and proven. I regularly talk to senior leaders at Google, and I'm an official Google Partner. My students, entrepreneurs all over the world, have already optimized their ad campaigns, cut costs, and boosted sales using my methods. These strategies work for any budget, whether it's $500 or $5 million. I invite you to use these proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. So, this is the admin panel of my hosting provider. I'm sure you have another hosting provider, but try to find in the dashboard IP statistics link or something like this. Ask technical support if you need. Where can I find the statistics about IPs? For example, this is my statistics and I can see that some IP address did almost 1,000 requests to my website. First of all, I can learn about what is this IP, okay? Some general information. In my case, I also can look at the log file and try to find what exactly this user with this IP address did on my website. And in my case, this user visited admin panel. So I'm sure that this is my technical guy, my technical expert who just set up my website for new landing page. So in my case, of course I will exclude him because I don't want to show, to spend my money to show my ads to the guy who is actually my employee. In your case, if you will find in this statistic some IP addresses that visit your website a lot of times or from unexpected countries, unexpected locations, just feel free to exclude them and eliminate the click fraud from your website. But with this technique, you can exclude only amateur-level click fraud. If somebody will decide to click fraud you professionally, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot exclude it. In this way the professional attack. How to manage auto-apply recommendations and why it's necessary to turn them off. So first of all, let's find where you can set up the auto-apply of recommendations. You can go to Admin, Account Settings, Auto-Apply, and press to go to Auto-Apply Settings. Or you can go to Campaigns, Recommendations, and choose Auto-Apply. If you will open these two tabs, Maintain Your Ads and Grow Your Business, you will find a lot of interesting things inside this. By default, all of these checkboxes are turned on, and Google can change your targeting, change your rotation, change your ads. Just imagine that you serve VIP clients. For example, you sell some incredible expensive cheap things. And in your ads, you intentionally mention that it's only for VIP, it's high price offer, and so on. But Google will decide that your ads will have higher CTR if Google will change your search ad with tags like a cheap thing, cheap products, big sales, and so on. And a lot of users who are looking for something cheap will go to your website and will ask questions, "Why is this, why it is so expensive?" But your actual targeting audience will just ignore your ads because they are not interested in something cheap. So I'm sure you don't want to give Google ability to change your ads. So turn it off, all of these settings, all of these checkboxes. As you can see, Google can turn on optimized targeting. Google can add New keywords. Let's say you waste not enough money on Google Ads and Google can add new keywords and help you to waste more without, of course, any value for you. Just add new keywords that Google can show your ads and charge you more. By default, Google can add broad match keywords, use display expansion, even change your bids. For example, change your target CPA. Google will decide that you spend not so many as Google wish for Google Ads and will just increase your target CPA. To avoid all of this situation, to avoid wasting of your money, just go to this setting Auto-apply and turn all of them off. After this, you can be sure that only you manage your Google Ads settings. Access and security in Google Ads. In this video, I want to share with you some important information about Access and Security options inside Google Ads and highlight for you how important it is and how important to keep the limited access to your account from the outside. So this option, this menu created to give ability to share access to your account with some third parties. There are 3 ways how can you share the access. The first one is 100% wrong. Never share access to your account in this way. So this is a way when you share with somebody else, with third-party person, your email and password to your Google Ads account. I think I haven't heard about this sharing method for several years, but somebody can still share the access in this way. Please never share the access to your Google Ads account in a way when you provide to somebody else your email and your password that link to this Google Ads account. There are two another ways. So the second way is to share access with some individual by accessing the Access and Security menu inside your admin panel in Google Ads. And then you just press plus. You need to add an email of this person, and I highly recommend you to add the access expires date. The date when this user will stop receive access to your Google Ads account. It's quite important because when we work with Google Ads for years, it's quite common when we share the access with different personalities with some guy from analytics, with some guy who did an audit for you, with some potential agencies that you want to work with, and so on and so on and so on. And after several years, you have a large list of emails that have access to your account. So why it's not the best idea? I want to share with you just one simple case. Let's say that there is an agency that worked with some individual account with some individual business several years ago. Then they stopped their collaboration and existed separately, but the agency still has an access to this individual account. Inside the agency, some employee, let's say, just decided to quit from his job but did it in bad way. He just argued with his boss and his boss said that he will not pay the salary for the last months. And Jack decided to make something bad for agency. Jack accessed through the agency account to several individual Google Ads accounts and just made a mess inside this account. He added some keywords, he increased the budgets, he deleted some ads, and so on. So in this case, the individual business had really big problems because their ads were just destroyed by some third-party person that even didn't interact with it in the future, but he destroyed their ads. So my advice to you, just several times per year, from time to time, look into access and security menu and exclude from this menu everyone who don't need to have access to your account. Also, when you share access with someone, of somebody else's, always try to give the person as low access as possible. If the person wants only to audit your account, choose read-only. If the person will somehow set up your advertising, your campaigns, and so on, give him standard access. If you need full access to the account, give to the person the admin rights. And the third way to share the access is to share access through the Managerial account. If you plan to work with some agency or company who has an MCC account or the manager Google Ads account, you need to share just your Google Ads account ID. You can find it in the top right corner. In my case, it's blurred for security reasons, but in your case, you'll find your Google Ads account ID. You can share this account ID with the third party and they will send the request for access to your account. You can answer to this request inside the Access and Security Manager menu, just press Approve the request. After this moment, they will have complete access to your account. And if you will need in the future to remove this access, you can easily press the button Remove access and they will stop have an access to your account. Always pay attention who can access to your account and try to have this list as short as you can. I wish you high conversions and great ads results. See you in the next videos.