Not all bots are bad, though. Some are helpful, like search engine crawlers, for example. But others, like click bots or spam bots, can mess up your analytics and make it hard to evaluate your traffic.  

That’s why Google Analytics 4 (GA4) plays an integral role in the process of identifying bot traffic and filtering out malicious ones. As a tool that contains records of all your website visitors, it can serve as an initial indicator of bot activity.   

In this article, we will explore the secrets of how you can use GA4 to identify bot traffic and take some actions to minimize its presence on your website.

What exactly is bot traffic?    

Bot traffic refers to automated website visits carried out by computer programs rather than human users. These bots serve various purposes, ranging from indexing content for search engines to analyzing the healthiness of your website… and also, unfortunately, stealing your data, spreading spam, or committing click fraud.      

Good bots, like search engine bots, play a helpful role in indexing and ranking your site. They contribute to the visibility of your content in search results, which makes them a must-have for the overall healthiness of your website. 

However, bad bots, such as click bots or spam bots, are the ones you need to watch out for. They can mislead your analytics by artificially inflating pageviews and sessions or triggering false interactions.  

What is bot traffic in GA4?         

When it comes to GA4, bot traffic refers to the above-described automated visits. As such, this traffic does not represent a genuine interest in your product or service, and if it infiltrates your analytics, it will impact your data accuracy.  

It’s important to mention here that GA4 automatically excludes web traffic from known good bots and spiders. This applies to bots with well-established identities and consistent behavior. 

Search engine bots and known SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush fall under this category, and their traffic wouldn’t show up in your GA4. However, some new or less popular bots, no matter good or bad, will still appear in your Google Analytics reports. It takes time for Google to detect repetitive visits across websites coming from the same sources or sources showing specific patterns.           

And while GA4 automatically clears your reports from the helpful bots, web traffic from the malicious bots still makes its way into your analytics data. 

But how can you recognize it and avoid its impact on your data and further activities? Let’s explore how you can do that in GA4. 

How can you identify bot traffic in GA4?  

Identifying bot traffic in Google Analytics involves using a combination of built-in features and additional settings. While GA4 includes some automatic mechanisms for filtering out known bots, it’s important to implement additional measures to enhance bot detection. Let’s explore some.   

Customize your reports     

The default reports in GA4 don’t contain all the metrics that can distinguish between bot and human traffic. So, your number one task is to customize your report data in a way that will help you recognize the signs of bot traffic.  

Our recommendations? The Traffic acquisition and User acquisition reports are the ones that hold most of these key metrics you’d like to have included, so let’s start from there.   

Here’s how to access these reports in your Google Analytics 4 account:  

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Select “Reports” from the left menu.
3. Expand the “Acquisition” section in the Life cycle collection.
4. Choose the desired report:
   • Traffic Acquisition report
   • User Acquisition report

Once there, you can start customizing your report by clicking the “Customize Report” button (pencil icon) in the upper right corner. Select “Metrics” under Report data, and you can start with adding metrics. 

Here’s our recommendation of metrics to have included under each of these two reports:   

Traffic acquisition report:    

• Engagement rate
• Average engagement time
• Sessions
• Engaged sessions
• Views per session

User acquisition report:         

• Total users
• Users (Represents the number of active users)
• New users
• Event count
• Engaged sessions per user

Recognizing suspicious patterns       

Here’s how to identify suspicious patterns in your data: 

Behavioral data:

• Short engagement sessions: Bots often spend seconds on a page, unlike humans. Check the engagement rate (the formerly known bounce rate in GA) and average session duration for anomalies.
• Unrealistic page views: Hundreds of pages viewed in a single session could indicate scraping bots. 
• Unusual interactions: Unnatural scroll patterns, rapid form fills, or visiting multiple pages with no mouse movement are examples of bot-specific interactions.
• A sudden flow of spam comments: Spam bots main purpose is to land on your website and spread spammy comments. They often promote unrelated products, use flattery language, or include irrelevant links. You can recognize them by the unnatural and generic language.   
• Declined card transactions: Fraudsters usually use stolen or non-existent credit card information. Many attempts to complete a transaction mean they’re trying different variations or the card they’ve stolen has been blocked. 

Demographic data:    

• Traffic spikes from a single IP address: Botnets or malicious scripts can generate high traffic volumes in a short time span. Sudden, massive increases in web traffic originating from a single IP address are a clear sign of bot traffic.
• Unlikely origins: Traffic spikes from countries you don’t target or visits classified as ‘Location not set’ might be bots. Unusual sources, such as unfamiliar websites, data centers, or crawlers with unusual user agents, are another sign of suspicious traffic.
• Unusual traffic sources: A sudden influx of uncommon devices or operating systems could be suspicious and indicate bot traffic. For example, a spike in new user acquisition by a single traffic source is a sign of suspicious activity.  

How to filter bot traffic in GA4?  

Now that you know how to recognize early signs of bot traffic in Google Analytics 4, let’s see how you can exclude it from appearing there in the first place. 

While GA4 doesn’t provide the same level of granular filtering as Universal Analytics, there are some features that can be used for this purpose.  

Use custom filters 

With custom filters in Google Analytics 4, you can modify or segment the data in your reports based on specific conditions. By applying your preferred criteria, you can tailor the data you see in your reports. This way, you’ll filter out suspicious or known bot traffic sources from messing up your data.

To access custom filters in GA4, navigate to the “Analysis” section and click “Reports.” Once you are in a report, you can find the “Filter” button at the top of the page.

You can create custom filters based on various conditions, such as events, user properties, or other dimensions. 

Choose the dimension you want to filter and set the conditions for inclusion or exclusion.

There are two types of filters you can find: “Include filter” and “Exclude filter.” As their names are self-explanatory, the first one is used if you want to include a particular type of traffic, and the latter is for the traffic you want to exclude. When filtering out bot traffic, you’ll naturally want to use the ‘exclude’ filter.    

You can set conditions based on various parameters, such as country, user properties, equality, inequality, regular expressions, etc.

For example, you might create a filter to exclude users who stay less than 10 seconds on your website.   

Create segments 

The purpose of the “Create segments” feature in GA4 is to help you define and save specific subsets of your data. This can also be done based on various criteria, and together with segments, you’ll be able to analyze and understand the behavior of specific groups of users or events within your overall data set.   

To create segments in GA4, navigate to the “Explore” tab in your GA4 property. Once there, look for the “Segment builder” in the top left corner. 

Under segment conditions, you can: 

• Exclude known bots:
  • Add a condition like “User Agent does not contain” and list common bot user agents (e.g., “Googlebot,” “Bingbot,” “SemrushBot”).
• Filter by IP addresses:
  • If you have specific IP addresses associated with bots, create a condition like “IP Address does not equal” and list those IPs. 
• Examine events and engagement:
  • Add conditions based on suspicious event patterns or low engagement metrics:
    • “Event count is less than X”
    • “Session duration is less than Y seconds”
    • “Pageviews per session is equal to 1”

Configure unwanted referrals 

In GA4, you can use the referral exclusion list to exclude certain domains from being counted as referrals. You can block up to 50 unwanted referrals per data stream to exclude known bot or spam referral traffic.

To set up the referral exclusion list, go to your GA4 property settings, navigate to “Data Streams,” and click on the relevant data stream. From there, you can find the “Referral Exclusion List” section.

Block bot traffic with a bot mitigation solution  

While these strategies can improve data reliability, they don’t guarantee the absence of bot traffic in your reports. GA4 filters can exclude bots from reports, yet it’s not foolproof against their access to your website.  

To truly combat bot and spam traffic, prevention is key. It’s not enough to simply filter them out of your Google Analytics data. You need to stop them from accessing your website and online activities altogether.

As a bot detection and protection solution, ClickCease blocks any type of bot targeting your ads, organic online activities, or website. This means your overall online traffic gets protected, ensuring accurate, reliable data in your Google Analytics 4.    

Ensure full protection against bots.

FAQs: 

How do I know if I have bot traffic?            

In your traffic reports in Google Analytics 4, you can spot suspicious user activity, usually common to bot traffic.  

Look out for unusual patterns like sudden spikes in events and conversions. For example, a user might be viewing many pages or items in a short time, which might be a sign of bots crawling your website rapidly to collect as much information as possible.   

Additionally, in the “Network Domains” report, you can identify traffic from unusual domains, which most likely come from bots. 

Another common sign of bot traffic is low time on page (or high bounce rate). Bots usually have very low time spent on pages. Examine these metrics to identify pages that might be attracting bot traffic. 

Some other anomalies include spikes in traffic, specific pages with abnormal patterns, or sudden drops in conversion rates. 

If you notice these signs in your GA4, there’s a chance that bots are affecting your traffic, and you may want to investigate further or implement measures to mitigate their impact.

Does GA4 block bot traffic?  

Google Analytics 4 automatic blocking excludes traffic from bots and spiders, which are already identified as such. This includes traffic from already known tools that serve for SEO or other beneficial website activities, as well as lists of already known malicious bot traffic sources.

This helps keep your data relatively clean and prevents skewed metrics about user behavior.

What are the limitations of GA4 bot filtering? 

While Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes known sources of bot traffic, there are many new bots, especially malicious ones, that are not detected by the automatic filters.

This means you’ll need to take manual measures to identify and filter out the remaining unwanted activities from your reports. However, there’s not a single report or metric that can represent signs of bot traffic. 

It takes a combination of reports to come to some insights. Sometimes, there’s no clear sign to distinguish between a bot and genuine user activity, which makes the process more complex.

For more accurate bot management, it’s recommended to consider further protection. These could include security plugins, CAPTCHAs, and even dedicated anti-bot services.         

The post How to Identify Bot Traffic in Google Analytics 4: A Full Guide appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

The definition of bot traffic

Bots are automated scripts that perform processes and tasks on the internet. These can be many and varied tasks, from collecting data for search results or research tools to scraping your content, spamming up your comments, or clicking on your paid ad campaigns.

As it has been found that an average of 40% of internet traffic is automated, i.e. bots, bot traffic is actually something that is hard to avoid. 

In some cases, we want bots to crawl our websites. For example, your website wouldn’t appear on the Google search results pages if it wasn’t for bots. And your keyword research also wouldn’t work so well if there were no bots. 

These good bots are the type that you don’t want to block. However, you might want to exclude them from your Google Analytics data.

But some bots cause all sorts of problems. Spam bots, spiders and crawling bots, carding bots, and more, all mess up your site traffic data, skew your marketing analytics, and more. 

Read more about bot traffic in our blog…

Identify bot traffic in Google Analytics

To identify bot traffic in Google Analytics, there are several tell-tale signs which depend on the types of bot visitors you have. 

1. Traffic spikes

Surges in site traffic don’t always indicate bots, after all some businesses experience random traffic surges from a viral social media post, referral by an influencer, or something else. But if none of these apply… It is often a very obvious signal that you’ve been visited by some form of bot traffic. This is especially true if you also experience some of the unusual metrics listed below.

2. Unusual metrics

If your site is seeing higher than average bounce rates, low session times, or a high percentage of single page views, this is another common sign of bot traffic. BUT… This can also mean that your pages are slow loading or offer a poor user experience, so before you start screaming ‘bot!’ take a look at the fundamentals.

3. Strange behaviors

Probably the most obvious sign that you’re experiencing bot traffic is when you see all the spam comments on your site, the declined card transactions, or the leads from nonsense email addresses. An increase in these non-human style behaviors is a common sign that bots are messing with your site.

4. Location ‘Not Set’

Look closely at your site visitors, and the location and OS are usually specified. However, bot visitors don’t always have their location set, which does show in your Analytics dashboard. If you’ve seen high traffic and you suspect bots, take a look at the geo-locations.

Find out more about using Google Analytics in their user guide

Do I need to block or exclude Analytics bot data?

Much of the Analytics data you see will include crawls from bots such as research tools (e.g: AhrefsBot or SEMrushbot-CT) or indexing for search engines, for example, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, et al. 

These definitely fall into the good bot category, and ones that you’re better off excluding from your analytics rather than blocking. 

When it comes to blocking bad bot activity, it’s often a case of adding known bad bot traffic to your exclusion list. 

So how do you create exclusions and blocklists?

How to exclude bots from Google Analytics?

There are four main ways to exclude bot activity from your Analytics dashboard. 

1. Use the standard bot filtering option in Google Analytics.

Go to Admin > View Section > View Settings – Tick the box marked Bot Filtering ‘Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders’. 

This will (obviously) remove all bot activity from your data. Note, that this means the data is removed, and the bots are not blocked.

2. Create a custom View and exclude specific bots from your data. To do this go to:

Admin > View and click the blue ‘Create View’ button. You’ll be asked to choose a name for your new view. Make sure that the Bot Filtering box is NOT checked.  

You can then add your own custom filters. To do this, under your new custom view, go to Filters. 

You can then choose predefined filters or custom filters.

Add your IP addresses, hostnames, ISP details, or any other information you want to each filter. You’ll need to verify the filter before you apply it to see how it would adjust your current data. 

3. Use the referral exclusion list.

Admin > Property tab > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List

This allows you to remove certain domains from your analytics data, especially those that seem to provide SEO spam or ghost spam.

Input the domains you want to exclude and save the filter.

4. Exclude bot activity from your existing Analytics data.

If you want to see how your historical website traffic looks without bot traffic, you can also add a filter easily.

From your Analytics home page go to:

Audience > Overview > Click on ‘Add Segment’ > ‘New Segment’

Name your new segment and then on the side panel, go to ‘Conditions’ and then choose the ‘Include/Exclude’ drop down. You want to choose ‘Exclude’.

Change the tabs to ‘Source’ and ‘Matches regex’ then input the domains you’ve identified as being bot traffic.

Click save and your filter is saved and the existing bot data will be excluded from Analytics. 

What do these solutions do?

Removing bot traffic from Google Analytics will give you a clearer picture of your traffic data, and allow you to get more insight into how much of your web traffic is genuine. 

Although it can be useful to remove this data from your Analytics, it won’t stop actual bot traffic on your website or ad campaigns. 

When it comes to removing bad bot activity from your website or ad campaigns, there is no substitute for using click fraud prevention.  

ClickCease uses the most advanced processes to block bad bot traffic in real time. This means that click fraud traffic, such as click farms or other non-human traffic cannot click on your PPC ads.

What is click fraud?

But what about organic or direct bots, DDoS attacks, or spam bot traffic?

Our new Bot Zapping solution offers protection for WordPress sites, letting the good bots in and keeping the bad bots out. 

By identifying bot traffic in real time, ClickCease filters out the malicious or spam traffic – and also lets the real human customers in too.

Run a free traffic audit on your PPC ads with ClickCease.

The post How to Spot Bot Traffic in Google Analytics (and Fix It) appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

But did you know you can customize your dashboard experience? This can be done using both Google’s own software and a range of third-party dashboard providers.

Google actually makes it easy to create a customized view using dashboard templates to help you stay on top of your most important Google Ads metrics.

But you might also want to add extra insight, collate information from across other ad campaigns or go deeper than the default view allows. 

So, if you’re wondering what data you can access to check and optimize campaign performance, we’ll take a closer look at the world of Google Ads dashboards.

Why do I need a custom Google Ads dashboard?

The Google Ads dashboard offers an essential overview of your ad campaigns with the key metrics you need. But by creating your own customized dashboard for Google Ads you can view performance metrics that are tailored to your specific needs quickly and easily.

Most search engine marketers will spend a lot of time reviewing their Google Ads campaign performance and sharing it across departments. So having the right statistics to view can make the difference to both your own workflow and if you need to collaborate with team members or clients.

These custom dashboards can be accessed easily so you can switch between them without too much hassle.

You can also share custom dashboards with specific people, for example, team members or clients. This makes it easy to share campaign-specific data without needing to grant access to your standard dashboard. 

So how can you set up your own custom Google Ads dashboard?

How can you set up a custom dashboard in Google Ads?

The custom dashboards can be accessed from the ‘Reports’ icon at the top of your Google Ads homepage.

On this page, you’ll be presented with a blank canvas to create your custom dashboard. You can view a sample dashboard to get the creative juices flowing or jump straight in.

If you start with the new dashboard, you’ll see a blank canvas of 12 blocks – two rows of six.

You can then insert your elements into these blocks.

You’ll find the full instructions on Google’s page for creating and editing custom dashboards.

When setting up a custom Google Ads dashboard you can create using the templates for:

• Reports
• Scorecard
• Notes

Reports

This is where you add the data about your campaign results and performance. You’ll find all manner of bar charts, pie charts, and additional insights. An example of the reports you can integrate into your dashboard using this category include:

• Conversion data
• Traffic data by time, date, or location
• Auction insights such as keyword or campaign performance 
• Comparisons between paid and organic search

Scorecards

With scorecards, you can monitor important metrics such as bounce rate, conversions, ad impressions, and your click-through rate.

The scorecard can be customized by date range such as previous 30 days or a specific date.

You can also customize the view as a chart, percentage view, or absolute change over the specified time period.

Note

As it sounds, this is where you can add notes related to your dashboard. This can be useful to add context or information for other viewers of your custom dashboard.

Sharing Google Ads dashboards

You can schedule a snapshot of the report in your dashboard with whoever you like, via email. Simply hit the share button add their email and customize the time, date, or frequency you’d like to share the data.

If you prefer, you can download a snapshot of the dashboard as a PDF by hitting the download button. This is obviously useful for adding to reports or presentations. 

Alternative Google Ads custom dashboards

Monitoring your Google Ad campaigns doesn’t just fall to Google.

There is, of course, a huge selection of software tools that can be used to manage your Google Ads as well. 

All of these tools can easily integrate with your Google Ads accounts and be used to monitor everything from your ad impressions or advertising budget to your conversion rate and other key performance and engagement metrics.

Some popular options include:

• Adzooma
• Adalysis
• Funnel
• Report Garden
• Optmyzr
• Skai
• ClickCease

All of these tools are built to monitor and optimize your PPC campaigns, giving a different perspective and a more complete view. And you can also export the data from these custom dashboards for your clients, or to present it to your own team, or as part of a PPC audit.

Taking Adzooma as an example, you can monitor ad campaign performance across multiple platforms, not just Google Ads. So if you need to see how your key metrics for Meta for Business ads are performing vs Google then you can add that to your custom dashboard.

With ClickCease, we focus on preventing fake traffic from bots or competitors. This invalid traffic, known as click fraud, can account for up to 60% of clicks and views on Google Ads campaigns. 

Find out more in our complete guide to click fraud.

Using ClickCease gives you a unique view of your invalid traffic that Google doesn’t see. For example, although Google does pick up invalid traffic, it isn’t in real-time. So when traffic is picked up as fraudulent, you’ll either need to apply for a refund yourself or wait for Google to refund you.

ClickCease also works with Facebook Ads and Bing Ads and can help greatly improve your ROAS on your ad campaigns.

Try out ClickCease for FREE for 7 days and get a completely different view of your Google Ads campaigns.

The post Everything You Wanted to Know About Google Ads Custom Dashboards appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

You’ll want to take a look at the auction insight reporting tool for Google Ads. This treasure trove of information can help you adjust your bids and work out areas you need to improve to rank higher.

What is Auction Insights for Google Ads?

The Auction Insights report is a downloadable data sheet that shows how your keyword bids have performed in the real time bidding auctions. It lets you compare the performance of your individual keywords and ad campaigns against anyone else in those auctions.

The theory is that you can see where your ads are performing and where they are falling short – and by how much. You can even see where your ads have tied with a competitor and whether your ad came out on top or not.

Auction Insights is available for:

• Google paid search
• Google Shopping
• Performance Max campaigns

You can then access six unique statistics related to the ad performance. These are:

• Impression share
• Overlap rate
• Outranking share
• Position above rate (Search campaigns only)
• Top of page rate (Search campaigns only)
• Absolute top of page rate (Search campaigns only)

How to access the auction insight report

Your auction insights report can be generated for the Google Ads campaigns that meet the minimum threshold for activity. What is the minimum threshold? Well, no one actually says, but based on other requirements for audience analysis, at least 1000 visitors within the past 30 days will be about sufficient.

To access the data, you obviously need to login to your Google Ads account.

You can then access data based on:

• Campaigns
• Search keywords 
• Ad groups

Choose the page for the data you want to analyze. Once inside, you’ll be presented with a list of available campaigns, keywords, or ad groups. Click the tick boxes for the ones you want to view.

Click on the Auction Insights button and you’ll be taken to the report.

If you have selected only search or shopping campaigns then you’ll have the data available right there. If you’ve selected a mix of search and shopping results then you’ll need to hit the corresponding radio button to switch between pages.

You can then, of course, filter your results.

How to read your auction insights data

So you’ve accessed the auction insights report, downloaded your data and now you’re wondering what it all means. 

Impression share

Impression share is calculated by working out the actual total of impressions against the potential total that were available. So for example, if your ad received 1000 impressions from a potential total of 10,000 then you’d have an impression share of 10%.

Overlap rate

If your competitor’s ad receives an impression at the same time as your ad then this is an overlap. The overlap rate measures how often your competitor’s ads were shown at the same time as yours. So for 20%, your competitor’s ads showed two times in every ten impressions.

Outranking share

As you might have guessed, this is the amount of times your ad outranked a competitor. And, of course, it also highlights the amount of times your competitors might have outranked you…

Position above rate (search only)

Similar to outranking share, this percentage explains how often your competitor’s ad appeared above you in head to head bids. And as stated, this can only be shown for paid search campaigns.

Top of page rate (search only)

Another self explanatory metric, the top of page rate highlights how often your ad appeared at the top of the paid search rankings. 

Absolute top of page rate (search only)

Similar to top of page rate, the absolute top of page rate refers to how often your ad is displayed at the top of the page as the very first ad. 

What can you do with auction insight data?

Now you can see how your ads are performing, the data might serve as a useful starting point for a PPC audit. Can you adjust your bids or up your ad spend? Do you need to work on your quality score? 

Google’s own recommendations for improving your search results and getting your ad ranked higher include:

• Increasing your ad campaign budgets
• Adjusting your keyword bids
• Focusing on improving your quality score
• Adjust targeting 

And of course, with the insight from the auction insight reports, you can see how these changes need to be enabled.

What isn’t shown in Google Ads insight data?

One thing you won’t see in your auction insights reports is data about invalid traffic. Often referred to as click fraud or ad fraud, invalid traffic is any form of non-genuine traffic clicking or viewing your paid ads.

You can actually view your invalid traffic, or IVT rate, in your Google Ads dashboard.

Google Ads normally picks up between 1-3% of clicks as invalid. However, by using our own fraud filters, an average of 14% of all clicks on paid search ads come from bots, competitor clicks, or other non-genuine sources.

Find out more in our complete guide to click fraud.

If you’re running Google Ads for your own business or on behalf of your clients, you can perform your own auction insights using ClickCease.

ClickCease will highlight fake traffic including fraud from sources such as VPNs or outside of geo location, fraud by specific keywords, and much more.

Sign up for a FREE 7 day trial of ClickCease to run your own traffic audit.

The post How to Use Google Ads Auction Insights and Rank Higher appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

After all, they do issue automatic refunds for invalid traffic. Don’t they?

And actually, once you get down to the details, what is invalid traffic? And is there anything you can do about it?

The definition of invalid traffic (IVT)

Invalid traffic is a catch-all term that refers to any non-genuine click activity on a paid link. Some of these clicks can be intentional and fraudulent, others might be genuine accidents or caused by poor ad placement or pop-ups.

According to Google:

Invalid traffic is any activity that doesn’t come from a real user with genuine interest. It can include accidental clicks caused by intrusive ad implementations, fraudulent clicking by competing advertisers, advertising botnets and more.

Although this is an accurate description, there is more to unpack behind that ‘and more’.

It’s worth bearing in mind also that there are different levels of invalid traffic. Certain types of bot traffic and malware clicks generate a very sophisticated form of invalid traffic, often hiding behind VPNs or mimicking human behaviour.

And although blocking bad traffic based on IP addresses can prevent some casual click fraud, understanding who, or what, is clicking your ads can change how you see invalid traffic on your digital ads.

What causes invalid traffic on my ads?

If we dig deeper into the definition of invalid traffic, there are numerous common themes such as:

• Paid clicks from click farms or paid-to-click sites
• Clicks from fraudulent placings such as ad stacking
• Spam clicks from an app or browser malware
• Multiple clicks from the same source
• Organized fraudulent traffic such as bot clicks (Watch the video below for more information about bot traffic).

Taking a look at each of these points in more detail…

Click farms and paid-to-click sites

A click farm is a location that sells website traffic for a variety of purposes. This might be to inflate social media engagement, increase website traffic statistics or even to click on a rival’s paid ad campaigns. Increasingly the click farm model has switched to PTC (or paid-to-click) sites, which are apps and websites offering users a remote income to click or view ads. In short, your ad might be being viewed by people who are paid a few cents to click but with zero chance of converting.

Fraudulent ad placements

Hiding and stacking ads is another way that invalid traffic can be routed to your paid campaigns. Techniques such as ad stacking are used to place one ad on top of another, earning the fraudulent publisher multiple payouts even though only one ad was viewed by the site visitor. Ads can also be hidden inside un-viewable iframes or even viewed when no human eyes are present…

Malware clicks

Software such as apps or browser extensions can often contain malware, which is software designed to carry out fraudulent activity. In the case of invalid traffic clicks, this means the app can take a genuine human click and route it to hidden ads, or even claim credit for later downloads or online purchases, a practice known as organics poaching. Malware clicks are often a sophisticated invalid traffic source, hiding their true activity behind genuine human activity.

Multiple clicks

A high volume of clicks from the same source will often indicate an organized click fraud campaign. This may be a click farm, but it could also be competitors clicking your ads or even those malware clicks I mentioned above. This is a red flag for invalid traffic in your Google Analytics, so keep an eye on those ad clicks.

Ad fraud

A popular form of cyber crime, ad fraud is when a payout is either collected on ads that have either been heavily inflated or never even viewed. Fraudulent website owners can perform ad fraud by hosting ads and then purchasing traffic to boost the views or clicks. This is usually bot traffic, meaning zero conversions for you…

Accidental clicks

Although practices related to click fraud and ad fraud are included in the term invalid traffic, it can also simply refer to people clicking on links accidentally. If you’ve ever clicked on a link while scrolling through a news feed, only to close it the moment it starts to load, well… That’s an invalid click.

The cost of invalid clicks

By definition, any clicks from these sources are invalid traffic, meaning that you shouldn’t have to pay for them – according to the ad platforms. 

If you’re using pay-per-click such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, each click can be quite costly. If you’re paying a few cents per click, you might dismiss invalid traffic as collateral damage in your marketing budget.

But if you’re bidding on keywords that have a higher dollar value, you might be more interested to know exactly how much invalid traffic there is out there, and how much it’s costing you.

Another factor to consider is that invalid clicks don’t just cost you money, they also reduce your potential for exposure to a genuine lead. If you’re an SME or digital marketing agency handling a limited budget, losing clicks to non-genuine actors can affect your KPIs and skew that return on investment. 

How much internet traffic is invalid clicks (IVT)?

Data suggests that over half of all online traffic is automated, coming from web scrapers and other bots.

But when it comes to paid search links, not all the invalid traffic is necessarily automated. As we’ve seen above, plenty of invalid traffic comes from sources such as vindictive business rivals, brand haters, or websites with poor ad placement.

Based on our own data here at ClickCease we’ve found that, as of 2020, the average rate of fraudulent clicks or invalid clicks is around 14%.

However, this is just the average, with some industries seeing over 70% invalid clicks on their PPC ads.

Photographers, locksmiths, and plumbers are just a few of the industries seeing these dizzyingly high rates of fake clicks on their ads.

And when it comes to industries such as law, finance, and e-commerce, the levels of IVT are still up around the 30% mark.

In fact, the majority of all paid search ad campaigns, around 90%, are affected in some capacity by invalid clicks and invalid traffic.

Read our research into click fraud in 2020 here.

How to spot invalid traffic

The common signs of invalid traffic include:

• High bounce rates on your site, or
• Low time spent on your site, usually with single page views
• Unexpected peaks in traffic
• Low conversions, especially during those traffic surges
• Multiple clicks from the same IP addresses
• Strange patterns of traffic peaks, such as increased traffic at unusual times
• Consistency in the strange traffic patterns

On their own, most of these signals might be indicators of other problems. For example, a high bounce rate could also indicate a poorly optimized ad or traffic peaks could relate to your campaign timing or the product you’re promoting.

But, if you spot a mixture of some of these; for example consistent surges in traffic with high bounce rates and no additional conversions, it’s likely this is caused by invalid traffic. 

How can you avoid IVT?

Invalid traffic is a sad reality of running a marketing campaign, but you don’t have to just accept it.

Firstly, if you think you’ve been affected by invalid traffic, you can contact your ad platform and express your concerns and ask for a refund.

You should also consider optimizing your search campaigns by using negative keywords, geographic exclusions, and using timing.  

The best way to avoid invalid clicks and invalid traffic?

Use ClickCease as part of your marketing strategy to block invalid traffic and prevent losing money to fake clicks. When you consider that using ClickCease for a month can cost as little as one paid click on some keywords, you could be saving yourself more than money.

We have a whole article explaining how ClickCease works (and why it’s the best), but to summarise:

• We block traffic based on our own device fingerprint ID, not on IP addresses (which can easily be masked)
• Our blacklist of known fraudulent devices is constantly updated and has been since our inception in 2016
• By using our machine learning algorithms and keeping an eye on click fraud and ad fraud trends, we are able to block some of the most problematic bots and fraud sources before anyone else is even aware of them

If you’re running Google Ads, YouTube, or Bing Ads search or display campaigns, run a free diagnostic on your ad traffic with ClickCease.

The post What Is Invalid Traffic (IVT)? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

It is a key marketing metric that can help you stay in control of your business budget and marketing expenses and, importantly, highlight which of your ad campaigns are working.

So, although there are many acronyms in digital marketing, this is an important one.

What is ROAS?

Return on ad spend, or ROAS, measures how well your ads are performing and how much you’re making back for your marketing efforts.

It refers to the income gained as a result of any advertising expenditure, such as new customers or sales generated through a specific campaign. If you’re running a campaign on Google Ads, you’ll be able to see the return, or at least the clicks or purchases, in your dashboard.

Your ROAS can be applied to your entire marketing and advertising budget or can be applied to specific campaigns. For example, if you’re running a PPC advertising campaign, a print publication campaign, and a direct marketing campaign, you might want to see how much your investment returns overall.

How to calculate ROAS

Your return on advertising spend is calculated by dividing the revenue generated by the advertising spend.

So, for example, if you spent $1,000 but made $10,000, your ROAS formula would look like this:

10,000 (revenue) / 1,000 (ad spend) = $10 (ROAS)

This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, you make back $10.

This is expressed as 10:1, or $10 for each $1 spent.

So, the ROAS formula is:

Revenue (divided by) ad spend = ROAS

When should you use ROAS?

Combining your ROAS monitoring with cost per lead or cost per acquisition (CPA) will show you how effective your ads are.

If you’re finding your CPA is high and your ROAS is low, then this implies that you might need to change your marketing strategy.

However, if you’re seeing a high return on ad spend for a low CPA, then this might indicate that what you’re doing is working, and you could focus more effort and funds on that specific channel.

Put simply, you want to make sure the profit margin is as big as possible.

This might seem obvious, but measuring these results and understanding how to improve profit margins from your ads isn’t always as simple as it seems.

Monitoring your return on ad spend can be done at any time during or after an advertising campaign. By checking your ROAS during a campaign, you’ll be able to check if anything needs adjusting and even stop an ineffective ad campaign.

How to keep track of your ROAS

Your return on ad spend will likely change throughout any marketing campaign, especially those run over an extended period. For example, if you’re running a promotion in the run-up to Christmas or Black Friday, you might find a surge in sales towards the big day. Keeping track of your ad spend versus revenue generated is the best way to monitor and track your ROAS.

Depending on the length and cost of your ad campaigns, you might wish to track them anything from daily to weekly.

Simply log your ROAS when you need it and keep tabs on the direction it’s going.

How to optimise your ROAS

For an e-commerce site or online store, optimising your return on ad spend can involve several aspects. Depending on your area, your market, and your product, in general, if you’re looking to improve your ROAS, try some of these approaches.

Target successful search terms in your PPC: Get rid of expensive or underperforming keywords that could be sapping your advertising spend. You might also find that there are keywords with high-volume clicks but lower conversions.

Improve your geo-targeting: Target specific geographic areas that are proven to be successful markets. This will avoid spending unnecessary marketing funds on an audience with little potential to convert.

Optimise your landing pages: Make it easy for your clients and customers to find what they’re looking for and to checkout. If people don’t instantly see what they’re looking for, they’ll leave your site, but you’ll still pay for the click!

Use click fraud detection software: If you’re targeting very competitive or high-value search terms, then you might find that your ad campaigns are subject to ad fraud or click fraud. By some estimates, around half of all internet traffic is automated or fraudulent, so by using software, you can avoid spending money on budget-sapping bots.

What is considered a good ROAS?

There is no definitive answer to what makes a good return on ad spend, but in general, as long as you’re making more back than you’re spending on advertising, you’re on the right path. After all, your return on investment (ROI) needs to be sustainable in the long run.

High-value services and products might find they need to be making 10:1, but a general supplies e-commerce store might be happy with an ROI of 4:1 or even 2:1.

As an example, if you’re selling cars at $15,000 per unit, and your net profit per sale is around $2,000, you might be happy with spending $500 to sell one car, a ROAS of 4:1.

This, of course, leaves you with $1,500 per sale, which then needs to cover your taxes, premises, and other overheads. The question then comes down to how many cars you need to sell a month to make this ROAS worthwhile. And does spending $10,000 mean that you will likely make car 20 sales?

Your ROAS is part of your general budget, so if your business overheads aren’t excessive, then 4 or 5:1 is a decent return.

Take a look at what you expect to make for each unit spent on advertising to understand your ideal return on advertising spend.

Using Google Smart Bidding: Target ROAS

Google Ads has a built-in Target ROAS bidding strategy. The theory behind it is that if a customer’s search is identified as being likely to convert, Google will automatically bid higher on your behalf.

Equally, if the search is identified as having a low chance of conversion, the bid will be set lower.

As the name suggests, the Target ROAS campaign aims to convert customers based on your target ROAS price. For example, you could set a target ROAS price at 500%, aiming for a 5:1 return on each dollar spent.

For example, if the average sale value on your site is $5, your ad spend would ideally be $1.

Google will then aim to set your CPC bidding at a maximum of $1 on those campaigns where you’re using Target ROAS.

The Target ROAS formula would be:

Sale value (divided by) ad spend x 100% = Target ROAS percentage.

$5 per sale / $1 ad spend x 100% = 500%

Conclusion

Your return on ad spend is a crucial metric when understanding the success of your business. By keeping track of your campaign metrics and your ROAS, and tweaking or optimising your PPC ad campaigns, you’ll be able to maximise your ROI from your advertising efforts.

One of the most damaging elements to PPC ad campaigns is click fraud. With fake clicks and impressions from bots or badly placed ads, marketers see their ROAS inflated massively.

Here at ClickCease, we’ve seen our clients save thousands of dollars each month by blocking bad traffic.

One of our clients, an airport services provider, saw $24,000 saved in one month by blocking IVT. Another, a digital marketing agency, saves their clients on average 15% of their campaign budgets from bots and click fraud.

The bottom line is to block click fraud with ClickCease, get more genuine paying customers, and improve your ROAS and ad performance.

Sign up for a FREE 7-day trial of ClickCease and find out how it can improve your profit margins on your ad campaigns.

The post What Is ROAS and How To Calculate It? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Hold up! What is a negative SEO attack?

What even is the point in a negative SEO attack? And, more importantly, how can you make sure it never happens to you.

There is a lot to take in, but in this post we’re going to answer all those questions and help you avoid falling victim to the impact of negative SEO.

What is negative SEO?

As you might expect, negative SEO is any strategy or campaign that causes a website to lose search engine rankings. 

However, negative SEO attacks are often an automated process that generates spammy links. They are often carried out by shady business competitors or someone who specifically wants your search rankings to be compromised.

Negative SEO can also be generated by poor quality link building on the part of the website owner – so it isn’t always an external factor that is to blame!

How to spot negative SEO

The most obvious result of negative SEO attacks is that you lose rankings, or you find yourself ranking for unusual or irrelevant keywords.

As a digital marketer, you use a number of keyword research tools (of course), and you obviously monitor your rankings on a regular basis. One or all of these factors may indicate that you’ve been impacted by negative SEO:

• A large loss or decrease in keyword rankings, especially for your top ranking search terms
• Unusual anchor text, often spammy or unrelated to your industry
• Lots of new backlinks from what appear to be spam sources
• A sudden run of bad reviews, often similar in content and from people who most likely never have been your target audience
• New or unusual content posted on your site, this may be within existing content or new pages created (a form of SEO spam)
• Lots of content duplication – content scraping is one way to get penalized by Google

Not all of these will show up in your research tools, and some may not be visible at all. 

But often one will be accompanied by another – for example if someone scrapes your content, they may link back to your site with a random anchor text.

What causes negative SEO?

The effects of negative SEO are normally a result of what Google considers to be bad practice for content creation. In marketing speak, it’s usually black hat SEO practices, whether that’s accidental or intentional.

Some common causes of negative SEO are:

1. Bad/spam backlinks

As a good digital marketer, you obviously focus on winning good quality backlinks from relevant sites. Spam backlinks often have the opposite effect, at least in the long run. 

These low quality backlinks can also be a source of junk website traffic, and can lead to Google penalties, including loss of search visibility or rankings.

2. SEO spam attacks

This sneaky practice is a popular black hat SEO technique used by low grade digital marketers. By inserting irrelevant links into a website, content scraping or misrepresenting content on a site (known as cloaking) a sneaky marketer can get some quick wins for their clients.

You might find that content on your website is linking to irrelevant content including adult themes. Or, you may spot the really weird Japanese spam attack, where your site links to sites using Japanese characters.  

Of course, this SEO spam damages your site, including your search rankings, and doesn’t even serve their clients well in the long run.

You can read more about SEO spam attacks on our blog.

3. Fake reviews

It’s easy to buy reviews in bulk from a number of places on the internet. How do fake negative reviews damage your SEO? Mostly, the issue is with brand reputation and the loss of traffic from reviews sites. 

If you use extensions in your ads, you can also find that your star rating drops, which obviously doesn’t look good when compared to your competitors.

4. Removal of backlinks

If you’ve spent time curating quality dofollow links from a broad variety of websites, it can be pretty disheartening to see that ‘lost’ link in your search console. 

But it can be quite simple for a competitor to put together a bulk email asking websites to either remove your link or make it nofollow. Why? Well, if you’re ranking well in the organic results and your competitor wants to leapfrog you, they could get an easy win if you lose a few of those quality links.

Another technique is to use the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act) to request a link removal. DMCA is supposed to protect intellectual property, for example a website hosting bootleg films or music. But, it can also be used as part of a coordinated negative SEO attack.

5. Content scraping

Sites with duplicate content can be penalized by Google. So, although it’s not guaranteed to knock you off the ranklings, content scraping can be damaging. 

This is usually when the scraped content is repurposed to link to other websites, or used to 

Often performed by automated processes, such as bots, content scraping can be one of the hidden forms of SEO spam attacks. The best way to block this form of activity is to block bot traffic on your website.

6. Spam comments and link farms

Some of the more damaging forms of black hat SEO are those where links are posted without real regard for the location. An obvious version of this is the spam comments with a URL inserted.

You’ve probably seen these if you run a site with a comment box – they usually look something like this:

As you’ll notice, there are usually backlinks within the name/poster’s details, and often within the comment too.

Is this good SEO?

Actually, comment spam is seen as low quality links, and usually gets flagged up for a Google penalty. Those of you search engine veterans will remember that comments used to be a valid source of backlink – but this isn’t the case with contemporary search engine optimization.

Another one is links from PBNs, also known as Private Blog Networks, or link farms. Again, this is an outdated form of creating backlinks, and one seen as being spammy.

High volumes of comment spam or link farm spam can lead to a high spam score and points docked in the battle for search rankings. You probably already know to avoid these negative SEO tactics in your own optimization campaigns, so it can be quite damaging if someone else does it for you.

Read more about spam bots and how they affect your marketing

How can you avoid negative SEO?

The best way to ensure your website is optimized as well as can be is to focus on purely white hat SEO strategies. This means:

• Focus on relationship-building, as well as link building
• Make sure your site is fast and mobile optimized
• Have a content strategy and stick to it
• Use social media to spread your latest posts
• Create content for your customers, not for search engine crawlers (but also optimize where possible)

Of course, you already know that focusing on white hat SEO is the best approach. What about those factors that you can’t control? What about damaging practices for sneaky competitors or malicious botnets?

Set up link alerts

One good way to monitor new and lost links is to create a new links alert for your domain within your keyword research tool. Ahrefs, SEMRush and other tools such as SERPstat will allow you to set up an email alert each time you gain or lose a link.

It’s a good idea to set up a unique email address for this one, such as linkalerts@yourdomainname.com. 

You can then check this every few days, or weekly, and if you notice any strange activity, you can take action (if action is needed).

The most common form of action to take is disavowing links that you have identified as spammy. But using link alerts and monitoring your backlink profile and the referring domains or anchor text can help you stay on top of any potential issues. 

Disavow bad links

There are several schools of thought with the issue of bad links impacting your SEO efforts.

Some believe that too many spammy links can definitely lead to Google penalties. But since Google actually looks at bad links and devalues them, the other school of thought is that you don’t need to do anything to combat spam links.

Google even states this on their disavow help form:

“Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or an SEO that you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.”

If you have seen some form of negative SEO attack, and you have a ton of spammy links pointing to your site, you might want to start disavowing.

The good news is that it’s relatively straightforward. 

You’ll also fund a pretty useful guide to disavowing links with Google’s disavow tool.

But to simplify it here; you simply put together a list of the links you want to block (export to a CSV and upload to an Excel or Sheets spreadsheet), and then use the disavow tool to upload to Google.

Monitor fake reviews

When it comes to fake reviews, it can be hard to block them. But the best thing to do is to have a process of checking your reviews every few weeks, or monthly.

Of course, it’s good practice anyway, especially if it means you get to respond to problems or negative comments from your customers. But it can also help you spot if there has been a trend of bad reviews in a short time frame. 

But what can you do if you are seeing a flood of bad reviews (or even a steady trickle)?

The obvious first thing to do is work out if there is an obvious reason for them. If there isn’t, and you’re sure the bad reviews are in fact fake reviews, you can try and report them to the review platform.

There are no guaranteed results here though, as it will depend on the policy of the reviews platform. But… If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Another way to fight back against fake reviews? 

Ask your happy customers to leave you good reviews. Run a campaign to get your average star rating back up and hopefully that can counteract the bad reviews.

Bot blocking

Not all aspects of negative SEO will incorporate bots, but many do… 

Typical bot activity related to negative SEO attacks can include:

• SEO spam
• Content scraping
• Link injection
• Spam comments
• User agent spoofing

Using bot blocking software, such as Bot Zapping by ClickCease, will eliminate or greatly reduce the chances of most of these sneaky practices happening on your site.

Bot blocking also helps to avoid other forms of cyber attack, such as DDoS attacks, spam bots and account takeovers or brute force logins. 

In the modern digital landscape, bot blocking is a necessary tool for any business, especially those running online shops, using PPC advertising or hosting an online database. 

Find out more about bot traffic and how it affects your business

Is negative SEO a big problem?

The truth is that negative SEO is still a relatively niche form of cyber attack. The average business website is more likely to be hit by a DDoS attack, brute force logins or some form of spam attack.

But that’s not to say it can’t or won’t happen to you.

By putting some processes in place, such as keeping track of your reviews and incoming or lost links, you can be forewarned if some form of negative SEO attack does impact you.

And by blocking bot activity on your site, you can be assured that content scrapers and spam injection shouldn’t be an issue for you.

ClickCease offers marketers protection for both their paid ads on Google, Facebook and Bing (click fraud protection). And now, you can also protect direct and organic traffic on your WordPress site too with Bot Zapping.

The post What is Negative SEO & How Can You Prevent It? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Without proper tracking tools, all that becomes a nightmarish task of spending hours crawling through your multiple campaign platforms and putting together your own PPC performance reports.

If that’s been your experience, you’ll be glad to know that there’s a better way. There are many PPC reporting tools that can help you generate these reports, save time, and maximize your ROI.

Why you need PPC reporting tools

Reporting tools don’t just save you time. They also make it so much easier to manage your campaigns and keep your clients in the loop. And yes, you may have invested in an assortment of tools for keyword research and more, and like those software packages, PPC analytics is a factor that needs close attention.

If we delve into a few PPC reporting examples, you’ll find that most managers need to accomplish 3 other objectives with their PPC automation.

Improve accuracy

Exporting reports and collating them in an Excel spreadsheet is not only time-consuming; it’s also error-prone. Instead of trying to summon your — if we’re being honest, non-existent — immaculate attention to detail, you could outsource that task to a pre-programmed tool.

Gain comprehensive insight

If your campaign is doing well with Google Ads but not on Instagram, you need a holistic way to view that data and plot a course forward. PPC reporting tools can do that for you.

Increase Productivity

Aggregate performance metrics, create a report, brand it with your agency’s logo, and send it out to clients, all without lifting a finger. That’s the kind of productivity that PPC reporting tools bring to the table.

Using reporting tools has been shown to improve productivity and help marketers get much more for their money.

Our Top 10 PPC reporting tools 

It can be tough to pick a single PPC reporting solution, so we’ve taken a look at the best ones available for both small businesses and professional digital marketing teams.

1. Reporting Ninja

Reporting Ninja offers many of the features you might need as a manager for a fair price. The tool can generate monthly reports automatically and send them out to clients, saving you a lot of time. 

But wait, do you want your customers to access their reports on a custom subdomain? No problem! Reporting Ninja will deliver on that too!

With over 16 integrations available, from Google ads to LinkedIn Ads, Reporting Ninja can generate stand-alone reports and combine them into one super report. 

Pricing starts at $20 per month for 10 reports and four users. It provides excellent value for money for managers looking to track their PPC ads and bring clients into the loop.

Key features

• Generate combined or stand-alone reports
• Schedule automatic report generation
• Create dedicated client portals on a customized subdomain
• Every report is only a few clicks away

2. Agency Analytics

Even though it’s designed for agencies, this PPC reporting solution brings a lot of features to every PPC manager’s arsenal. It has 50+ app integrations that allow you to comprehensively track everything from social media to paid advertising and even email marketing. 

Agency analytics also allows you to customize your own dashboard which flattens the learning curve if you’re used to another PPC reporting platform. This customization option also extends to client reporting because the tool allows you to use white-label PPC reporting. 

There are two tiers of plans available on Agent Analytics, with the lowest being $49 per month. The platform offers a 14-day free trial.

Key features

• SEO reporting metrics included
• 60+ integrations available with new ones every month
• Customizable dashboard
• Dozens of reports templates plus a drag-and-drop report builder

3. Swydo

Swydo allows you to create a comprehensive PPC report in minutes, drawn from multiple platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. Like many effective PPC reporting tools, it also allows you to easily distribute your client reports. 

The platform makes it easy to monitor KPIs such as clicks and costs and customize your data based on specific client goals. When the reports are ready, you can export them into PDF and schedule them monthly, weekly, or daily. You can also send out a direct access link which can be used to access them online.

Swydo plans start from $39 per month for 10 data sources but paying for additional data sources earns you a steep discount. There’s also a 14-day free trial.

Key features

• Set and monitor important KPIs
• Schedule and send reports with ease
• Add branding elements to reports
• Integrate seamlessly with over 36 apps

4. Octoboard

One of Octoboard’s best features is the ability to follow site visitors, regardless of how they arrive on your website. It’s a PPC reporting platform, which means it also allows you to track your metrics and generate concise reports. 

You can even automate the entire process, so the results go out according to a preselected time frame. With Octoboard, you can add your own branding to reports and dashboards, host a dashboard on your website, or create dedicated log-in areas for clients and staff. Subscribers can also create multiple embedded SEO audit forms that capture visitor’s detail and eventually lead to conversions.

Octoboard plans start at $16 per month for 5 reports and go to $42. Users get a 30% discount on the yearly plan.

Key features

• Automatically generate and send reports 
• Track site visitors
• Create dedicated areas for clients and customers
• White label everything

5. DashThis

DashThis is an automated PPC reporting solution that provides small and large agencies with powerful features for managing their data. The tool has 34+ integrations that make it easy for you to pull data from multiple sources and turn them into a comprehensive report in minutes.

You can also create and customize a dashboard for colleagues and clients to share your reports. Alternatively, DashThis allows you to automate your report distribution so clients can receive real-time feedback. Other great features include agency customization options, preset report templates, and an SEM dashboard report.

DashThis prices start at $33/month for 3 dashboards and go up to $339/month for 50 dashboards. There’s also a 15-day free trial included.

Features

• White label and customization options
• Dedicated dashboard for multiple users
• Automate report creation and distribution
• 30+ integrations available

6. Metrics Watch

If you like to see your marketing data in an at-a-glance visual style, then Metrics Watch will be right up your digital street. It’s also one of the simplest tools on this list, with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder allowing you to custom insert graphs, charts, and lists.

You can also connect Facebook Ad campaigns, including Instagram Ads, as well as Google Ads and Linkedin Ads.

Metrics Watch also allows you to send your custom PPC reports direct to your client’s email, so you don’t even have to do anything.

Pricing starts from $29 per month for up to 2 reports, and $50 for 10 reports, with the option for a custom enterprise package. You can also check out Metrics Watch with a 14-day free trial.

Features

• Drag and drop report building
• White label branding
• Nice visual layout
• Integrates with popular tools including Google Analytics and Mailchimp

7.  Funnel

If you’re looking for comprehensive reports across all your marketing data, then you’ll probably want a tool like Funnel. As well as monitoring Google Ads performance, Funnel also integrates with marketing and sales platforms such as Facebook Ads, Salesforce, Hubspot, TikTok, Baidu, and… 

Well, actually, there are over 500 app integrations, so if there’s something you’re looking for it’s probably here. 

For digital marketing data, Funnel allows you to collate information into simple to manage reports, and even allows you to clear up messy naming systems or disparate campaigns. So you can track your ROAS across all your marketing channels, and deliver custom reports too.

This huge functionality doesn’t come cheap, with prices starting at $399. There is no free package, but you can schedule a demo to check out all that Funnel has to offer.

Features

• Collect and present marketing data from over 500 integrations
• Analyze data from up to 2 years
• Easy to create no-code data rules
• Option to create reports and dashboards wherever you like

8. Report Garden

An agency favorite, Report Garden is an easy-to-use tool to generate marketing reports on your PPC ads, as well as your SEO campaigns and social media. 

Create custom PPC reports on your Google or Microsoft/Bing Ads, track the performance of your Facebook or Instagram Ads, and track performance on popular e-commerce platforms.

There is also a white-label dashboard for Google Ads, which allows you to present real-time data and KPIs clearly. 

Price-wise, Report Garden starts at $89 which supports only Google Ads tracking. If you want to access the full complement of integrations, you’ll need to look at the Pro plan which starts at $299 a month. Try out Report Garden with a 14-day free trial.

Features

• Manage reports for PPC, SEO, and social media campaigns
• White label reports
• Easy report generating with drag-and-drop widgets
• Great simple dashboard options

9. Adalysis

This PPC reporting tool doesn’t just create automated PPC reports. It also gives some extremely useful insights to help you improve your ad campaigns and even offers a to-do list to enable you to improve your Google Ads quality score and other ranking factors.

Adalysis also claims to be the only ‘fully automated ad testing platform’, with 6 metrics to identify underperforming ad campaigns.

Analyze PPC campaigns on Google Ads and Bing Ads, keep on top of your budgeting and, of course, generate professional reports for multiple clients with over 50 report templates.

Pricing for Adalysis is based on your ad spend, with a subscription starting at $99. You can check it out for free for 14 days.

Features

• Automated analysis and A/B testing on your ads to help you optimize
• Daily audit checks keep your ads on top of the SERPs
• Generate white-label PPC reports
• Get insight into your display ad placement too! 

10. ClickCease

OK, truth be told, ClickCease is not a PPC reporting tool. BUT… 

By using ClickCease you’ll be able to generate reports on the amount of fake traffic your website is getting from both paid ad campaigns, and direct and organic traffic on WordPress sites.

As a digital marketer, this kind of insight can be incredibly valuable to your business or agency clients. And, like any good PPC reporting tool, you can generate a white-label report to show your clients how much money you’ve saved them. 

ClickCease works with Google and Bing Ads and also blocks bad traffic from Facebook Ads, including Instagram.

Features

• The click fraud prevention tool of choice for professional marketers
• Show your clients how much fake traffic has been blocked, and their savings
• Blocks bad clicks on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and WordPress sites (direct/organic)
• Custom blocking offers industry-specific presets

Conclusion

The choice of PPC reporting software available can be bewildering, and knowing which one is right for your team can be tricky.

All of these tools allow customers to manage multiple clients and put together professional reports, often using custom metrics. Making use of the free trials on offer is the best way to get to grips with the right tool for you and your team.

When it comes to delivering those key metrics, either for business owners or marketing agencies, everyone wants to focus on the bottom line. How much money have you either made, or saved?

Click fraud and ad fraud have been shown to waste the digital marketing industry over $40 billion every year. Most businesses see around 14% of their ad traffic coming from fraudulent sources. 

Read more in our complete guide to click fraud

Run a traffic audit on your site with our free 7 day trial and see for yourself exactly who clicks your ads.

The post Top 10 PPC Reporting Tools For Your Ad Campaigns appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Just like that…

So what is SEO spam? How can you tell if it’s happened to your site, and what can you do about it?

What is SEO Spam?

SEO spam is a black hat SEO technique, often carried out as a form of automated cyber-attack. By accessing your website through various vulnerabilities, an SEO spam attack can be used to fill your site with strange content, malicious links, and even spam malware.  

The purpose of SEO spam is usually for the fraudulent party to inflate the search rankings on a website by building backlinks, in bulk, from compromised sites. 

Anyone who has worked with SEO knows the importance of backlinks to improve organic rankings. For hackers and spammers, taking a shortcut by creating spammy backlinks means they can see a huge improvement in their organic search engine rankings in a short period of time.

Again, anyone who has worked with SEO will also be aware that this is a very shady black hat SEO technique that will likely incur a number of penalties for the fraudster.  

But these spammers are most likely selling their services as search engine marketers, and so all they need is to show quick results, and they can get paid. Black hat tactics aren’t important to them in the short term (or at all).

Interestingly, a report from 2018 found that 51% of website hacks are used for or related to SEO spam.

Of these SEO hacking attacks, the vast majority affected WordPress sites. In fact, WordPress SEO spam is very much ‘a thing’, as evidenced by the number of security plugins available on the platform to prevent and clean the aftermath of hacked websites.

How Can You Spot SEO Spam?

In some cases, the effects of SEO spam can be quite subtle. Often a spammer will simply insert a few links into an existing article or, at worst, spoof a page (i.e., create a new page on your site copied from somewhere else) to create a contextual backlink to their target site.

As the website owner, you might not even notice these small infiltrations at first.  

However, there are also more aggressive forms of SEO spam, such as creating multiple pages and links to sites, ‘cloaking,’ and hiding backlinks within the source code of a site.

Some common signs of SEO spam include:

• Links to sites that you don’t recall inserting
• New categories, pages, and content that you didn’t post
• Redirects from your site 
• Unusual ranking metrics in your research tools
• Content on your site in a different language 

Often you will notice the signs of SEO spam if you use keyword research tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. 

If you use a plugin like Akismet on WordPress (and if you don’t, you should), then you’ll probably notice a lot of spam gets picked up.  

Check out our article about how spambots damage your marketing and your website.

Common Forms of SEO Spam

Although SEO spam tends to be performed for the same reason, by posting spam links and content on your site, there are different practices associated with it. 

Cloaking

One of the main practices associated with SEO spam is cloaking. This is where the information presented to the search engine is different from that hosted on the site.

So the page might be about hotel bookings, but the search engine is presented with content about pharmaceutical products. 

Cloaking is usually done by creating a new page and creating a redirect so that the search engines scan the hidden page instead of the original. As well as misleading the site visitor, who lands on a page different from the one they might have been expecting, cloaking can also result in Google penalties. 

Banner spam

Another sneaky way of stealing some backlinks is by manipulating banners hosted on your site. Ad banners, such as those delivered by Google Adsense, can have code inserted so that the backlink points to the fraudulent site.  

This form of banner spam can also be used by affiliate marketing fraudsters to inflate their referral traffic and subsequent payout. 

Spammers can even hijack your site’s CTA buttons, download buttons, and other non-advertising-related features for spam SEO purposes.

The Japanese keyword hack

An unusual but common method of SEO spam is to inject Japanese characters and content into a site using brute force. This is usually a method of generating backlinks to scam-based sites and can be a bit of a shock when it happens to you.

The giveaway is usually when you notice that your site is ranking for Japanese search terms. 

Fixing the Japanese keyword hack is a fiddly task and usually requires the use of a software product.

Link injection and redirects

Using link injection or spam redirects, a hacker can insert a hidden link or mask a URL within an existing webpage. 

A scary aspect of link injection is that there is usually an element of malware on your site. The code used for this malware element is usually embedded in the web page. This means that when a user clicks a link, the malware will insert a spammy link and redirect the user to a scam site. 

Google Search Console often flags this up as a threat and messages the administrator. But, with the progression in cyber fraud technologies, you can’t take this for granted.

The Damage: Negative SEO

For marketers who have spent their time building up organic search results, the impact of SEO spam can be incredibly damaging.

One of the most obvious results is the problem of negative SEO. This is when black hat techniques are applied to your site, which damages your search engine rankings. In short, if you were ranking well for some search terms before, you may find yourself falling quickly off the first page.  

And, as you probably already know, getting your organic results back onto page one can be a hard struggle.

The Damage: Google Penalties

With all this shady SEO on your website, another obvious problem is penalties from Google. If your respectable e-commerce site is suddenly linking to a porn site, scammy casino page, or newly set up scam retail shop, you might find Google takes a dim view.

And, of course, Google isn’t weighing this up on a case-by-case basis. They simply see that your site is full of bugs and links to crappy sites and… Oh, dear. Penalties.

These types of penalties can take time (and a lot of effort) to recover from.

How Does SEO Spam Work?

Like many forms of cyber attack, SEO spam exploits weaknesses and vulnerabilities on your site. This might be a weak password, an outdated plugin, or a lack of security on your site – for example, no SSP.

By using bots to scan your site, hackers can highlight a weakness and compromise the database or CMS. Popular site builders such as WordPress or Shopify can be particularly vulnerable as they use many plugins, and the users are often not technically minded.  

By not updating security patches when they’re available or failing to remove old or outdated plugins, website users leave an open back door for SEO spam and other types of hacking attacks.

Methods to Avoid SEO Spam on Your Site

The best way to avoid SEO spam is to make it hard for bots and spammers to get into your site in the first place. In general, this means:

• Using a strong and complex password for all your administration logins
• Regularly updating software, plugins, and external elements
• Removing any old or outdated plugins
• Using software to prevent bot attacks on your site

Cyber attacks such as brute force logins are one of the easiest ways for attackers to access your site. So strong passwords are an absolute minimum requirement.

Blocking bots with software is also an increasingly essential part of online security. ClickCease’s new Bot Zapping blocks the kinds of bots that carry out SEO spam attacks, amongst other bot-related issues.

If you use a WordPress site, you can use Bot Zapping by ClickCease with your existing subscription or use it as a standalone service.  

How to Check Your Site for SEO Spam

Spotting SEO spam on your site isn’t always the easiest thing. As we’ve mentioned, the content can often be hidden.

There are several methods you can use to scan your website for SEO spam.

The manual method

If your site is relatively small, you may be able to easily go through and check on-page elements such as links and content.  

Keep an eye out for:

• URLs that shouldn’t be there
• Content that looks like it may have been corrupted or tampered with
• New elements such as iframes (content boxes often used to host videos or ads)
• Foreign language elements
• Spam comments (usually containing links)
• New footer or header links or content within existing footers/headers

You can also use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush to see if you’re ranking for anything unusual. Most keyword research tools like this have the option to check outgoing links, so take a look through and check for any that don’t look right.

Another way to check manually is to search on Google using the following method:

• Go to Google
• In the search box, type in: “site:yourwebsitename.com intext:searchterm”

Be sure to use the exact formatting as above.

Where ‘searchterm’ is used, you can input one of the many common spammy keywords, such as:

• Cialis
• Viagra
• Canadian pharma
• Erectile dysfunction
• Bitcoin
• Crypto

This will display any pages on your site which are ranking in Google for these spam keywords.

As we’ve mentioned though, much of the spamdexing done by these cyber attacks are invisible to us.

So, this means you might need to use a more technical method.

Using software

There are several software packages that are designed to scan for malware, viruses, and the results of SEO spam attacks in general.

They’ll usually scan your site and do their thing, much like an antivirus. The best-known are:

• Sucuri
• Defender
• Ninja Scanner

Each of these offers a WordPress plugin that can clean your site of damaging SEO spam.

If you’re trying to avoid WordPress SEO spam, make sure to also use software such as Akismet as standard.

The Key is Bot Zapping

Like many forms of damaging attacks online, it all comes down to bots. Hackers target websites with weak security or obvious vulnerabilities, and the easiest way to do this is to deploy bots to find those weak links.

This means that any website owner needs to take site security seriously, especially if that website handles customer data or even if it’s your livelihood.

There are plenty of tools available to block bots on your website.

With ClickCease, you can protect bad traffic on your PPC ads. And now, you can also monitor and block bots and malicious visitors from organic sources.

Bot zapping by ClickCease provides protection from exactly the kinds of bots that carry out SEO spam attacks before they even happen. 

Find out more about Bot Zapping.

The post What is SEO Spam and How Does It Impact Your Site? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Most of us, as digital marketers, have seen this coming. Talk of privacy first and changes to tracking have been rumbling for several years now.

In April 2021, Apple announced it would give users more power to opt out of tracking on their devices with their iOS 14 update.

Around the same time, Google announced they would introduce their privacy sandbox and do away with third-party cookies. Although there have been changes to some of their methods, Google is still rolling with a more privacy-focused approach to the internet.

And Facebook? Well, Meta, as they’re now known, is still reeling from the changes introduced by Apple. But they will quite likely be a leader in the metaverse – for whatever that’s worth.

So, what does it all mean for the future of online advertising? For pay-per-click (PPC) in particular, there are likely to be some big changes in the works in 2022 and beyond.  

The rise and fall of tracking and targeted ads

Since Google rolled out its groundbreaking internet search tool, pay-per-click has been used to monetise its business. And that makes sense, of course. If people are looking for something, then they’re more likely to be converted by a well-placed ad.

Using third-party cookies adds a whole other dimension to this advertising method.  

If they’ve looked at certain websites or searched for certain things, we can make some reasonable deductions about people’s ‘legitimate interest.’

Although this works great for advertisers, it’s not so good for individuals, especially when you factor in privacy concerns.  

And with Facebook, the issue becomes even more complex.

Some high-profile scandals (Cambridge Analytica) and the issue of fake news on social media, societal polarization, and extremism have added fuel to the fire with regard to how content is targeted. So the question of tracking and online targeting has been accelerated to the top of the digital industry’s to-do list.

Whether or not the issues with Facebook have had a direct impact on Google and Apple’s decisions is open to debate. But the wider concerns around online privacy have been simmering under the surface for many years.

This also follows the ruling in the EU that the consent mechanism for GDPR, those intrusive cookie permissions boxes, are actually illegal under European law.

For internet users and consumers, these changes to privacy online are to be celebrated. Most people want to keep their details private and avoid sharing them with hundreds or thousands of companies around the world.  

But in the marketing world, we’ve always been told that personalisation is better. Is it true?

Do people want relevant, targeted ads?

One of the main arguments for online tracking and targeted advertising is that ‘people prefer ads that are relevant to them.’ 

However, this argument has been soundly challenged by Apple’s latest tracking changes. With the 2021 update to iOS 14, users can choose to opt-in or opt-out of third-party platforms such as Facebook.

In America, at least, the response was overwhelming. 94% of users would prefer not to share their data. This means that the majority of iPhone users have chosen not to have targeted or relevant ads.

A study from Global Witness found that only 11% of people are happy to have their personal data used to target them with ads. The same study found that 57% of people don’t want to be targeted by any ads, and 26% objected to targeting by political ads.

Marketers might also wield the statistics that GDPR has been largely useless and that something like 50% to 76% of people ignores those cookie pop-ups (Deloitte study). But opting out of the cookie policy of every website you visit is a lot more hassle than denying access via your operating system.

The most common way for people to block ads is to use ad blockers. In fact, around 40% of users block ads using ad blockers (source1 source2).  

Considering that a large proportion of internet users are not tech savvy or even unaware of ad blockers, this is still a large chunk of the global internet users.

Additionally, privacy-first search and browsing options are also on the rise. Brave, the privacy-based website browser that blocks ads as standard, has seen an annual doubling of its user base every year for the past 5 years. (source)

The takeaway is that people say that either they don’t trust digital advertising or they find it so intrusive that they’d rather not be exposed to it.  

And they’re happy to skip out on the personalized advertising if it means they keep control of their personal data.

Change is coming

Despite the objections of marketers, the digital marketing industry is responding to the demand for change.  

Online advertising still pays for much of the free internet, and people understand that free content comes at a price. But in general, they prefer that the price wasn’t their personal data.

However you look at it, the methods of tracking users online are going to change (they already are). So whatever the impact on the way our ads are served, or the methods we use to target our audience, marketers are going to have to adapt.

Do these changes to tracking mean less effective ads?

Although it might be too early to give a definite answer right now, we can look at some other recent privacy changes to see how the industry has coped.

One of the biggest changes is recent legislation, specifically the GDPR, and CCPA. These two initiatives to protect the digital privacy of citizens of the European Union and California have had little to almost no impact on the popularity of PPC ad campaigns for marketers.

Yes, there was some disruption to the activities of ad tech companies in the run-up to the GDPR. But it seems that overall the actual effects for marketers have been minimal, according to this article.  

In fact, despite initially losing on average 23% of their database due to the change in the law in Europe, after a year of GDPR, marketers actually grew their databases and were even seeing returns beyond pre-GDPR levels. (source)

…Change is good?

Although the impending Google privacy updates and the threat of less tracking and less targeting present a headache for digital marketers, the fact is that change is always happening.

Google and Facebook have changed the way ads are targeted, or how campaigns are run multiple times. 

So although these changes look like they might be hugely disruptive, the truth is that change presents opportunities. The opportunity to improve our processes and change how we get our message out there.

Ilan Missulawin of ClickCease says, “Although marketers love ad tracking, the truth is that customers don’t. And the big ad tech players have had to find a way to make their platforms work for paying advertisers while at the same time not compromising the privacy of their users…

“Up until now, it’s been a balancing act, and the changes to tracking are, in all honesty, totally overdue

“… compounding the issue has been the ever-present problem of click fraud and ad fraud, which have been damaging to the reputation of PPC ads. And this is an issue that has never really been tackled by the AdTech vendors.”

So are Google’s privacy and tracking updates going to have any impact on the rates of invalid traffic on digital advertising?

The problem of fake traffic 

In 2021, we released data highlighting that fake clicks on paid ads, also known as click fraud or ad fraud, were responsible for over $35 billion of lost revenue.  

Although often downplayed by search platforms and, to an extent, by marketers, click fraud has been growing annually since the dawn of digital marketing.  

Our in-house data shows that we block, on average, over 14% of all ad clicks as fraudulent. And this is after the filters applied by Google. 

Read more about click fraud in our complete guide

It’s not so much fake ad clicks on Facebook as fake profiles. Impressions from automated accounts and bots are just as big a problem on Facebook and Instagram, although the percentage is slightly lower than on Google.  

Although you might think cookies and tracking should help eliminate invalid traffic by identifying genuine users, that isn’t the case.  

“Google announced in 2021 that they would be changing the way they monitor invalid traffic as part of their switch to the FLoC ad tracking. However, this initiative was dropped, and we have heard nothing else on the subject of bot blocking or fraud filtering”, says Ilan.

“Our fraud filters already preserve the privacy of the user but are more effective in removing bots and other forms of malicious activity on paid ads.”

What changes are introduced to reduce invalid traffic remain to be seen. Privacy remains the major focus. But whatever the new solutions for preserving privacy while also running ads, it’s likely that marketers will still find a way to flourish because…. Well, that’s what we do!

Running PPC campaigns on Google Ads or Facebook Ads? Check how much of your traffic is genuine, filter out bots and malicious clicks, and much more. Run your own ad campaign audit when you sign up for a FREE ClickCease trial today.

The post What You Need To Know About Google Privacy & Ad Tracking Changes in 2022 appeared first on ClickCease Blog.