PPC or pay-per-click advertising is an excellent way to get the attention of your target audience immediately. However, PPC management for lawyers comes with the risk of potential click fraud, which remains the gravest concern for most law firms. Research states that 20% of clicks on PPC ads are fraudulent.
The click fraud can exhaust your PPC budget without producing the desired results, offering your competitors an advantage over you. In worst-case scenarios, it may also get you locked out of your PPC account.
Let’s get a quick overview of what it is and how you can prevent it.
1. What Is Click Fraud?
In simple words, click fraud is a black hat technique. With this technique, your competitor can falsely increase the number of clicks for your advertisement campaigns. Thus, it drains your PPC budget quickly without letting you get any web traffic. It also shoots up Click-Through Rates (CTRs) or costs on advertisements with no conversions.
2. How to Reduce the Risk of Click Fraud?
While Google is trying its best to prevent the click fraud, you also need to take a few steps at your end to ensure your PPC management for lawyers is on the right track.
Here’s what you can do.
A. Set up IP Exclusions in Google Ads
This is an excellent way to stop click fraud, especially if you already know the IP addresses that look suspicious. With this step, you can block those IP addresses from seeing (and hence, clicking) your ads permanently.
- Log into your Google Ads account
- Open the campaign of your choice
- Find the Additional Settings tab under the main Settings option
- Go to the IP Exclusions option
- You can simply copy-paste the suspected IP addresses and click save
Once this is done, no one using these IP addresses will be able to see or click your advertisements.
B. Set Different Bid Prices
Another way to bring down the risk of click fraud is to control the bid prices set for different PPC advertisement campaigns. While this method will not help you prevent the click fraud altogether, it will certainly help you bring down the financial risk associated with it. Carefully check all your campaigns, how the ads are performing, and how diverse your bid prices can be.
In addition to this, you should also avoid placing your ads on low-quality websites. Low-quality websites are more likely to have bots that are designed to perform click-fraud. On the other hand, well-established websites often take the necessary precautions to avoid click-fraud.
C. Geo-Targeting
One more effective way of preventing click fraud is geo-targeting. You can weed out fraudulent clicks by restricting your advertisements to specific locations. In some developing countries, there are click farms where cheap labor is used to click on advertisements for money to boost the owner’s PPC revenues.
Furthermore, the lack of proper cybercrime laws can also make it difficult to bring these perpetrators to light. You can avoid the risk of potential fraud by excluding such countries from your list of locations.
Besides, for law firms that do not offer overseas legal services, there is no point in placing ads in countries other than the US. If your firm operates only locally, you can also set ad display limits to your service locations.
- Go to your Google Ads account dashboard
- Choose the desired campaign
- Go to the inner menu on the left and select the Locations tab
- Now click on the Excluded tab on the map
- Click the round, blue pencil icon to select locations that you want to exclude from the campaign
- Don’t forget to save the list
D. Track Your Advertising Campaigns
To ensure your PPC campaigns are running smoothly without any fraud, keep a close eye on all of them. Comparing the past and current data can help you detect any discrepancies. You should look for the following things when tracking your campaigns:
- A sudden spike in your ad spending
- A sudden drop in your conversion rates
- Quicker-than-usual consumption of your daily Google Ads budget
- A sudden increase in your bounce rate
The two tools you can use to track your PPC campaigns are Campaign Performance and Account Performance.
Parting Words
PPC click fraud is more common than you can imagine. However, with a few simple precautions, you can reduce the risk of potential click fraud significantly. Hopefully, the above four tips should help you in this regard. You can also hire law firm marketing services providers like Gorilla Webtactics to do the legwork for you. From PPC management for lawyers to law firm web design, we can take care of all your digital marketing needs. Call us today at (612) 260-1506 or contact us online, and let us help you.