ClickCease Gives Google Ads Layers of Security

Summary: ClickCease is a web marketing tool that aligns with Google Ads. Most marketing endeavors cost money. Therefore, we do everything possible to protect that investment and remove wasteful ad spending. Click fraud, spambots, and competitor clicks exist.

ClickCease is a tool that allows us to add layers of security for your Google Ads account to avoid or prevent spam and competitor clicks.

What is ClickCease?

ClickCease is an anti-fraud, detection, and prevention service software. The tool bolts onto Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads.

There are many tools on the market, such as PPC Protect, ClickGUARD, Clixtell Click Fraud Protection, AppsFlyer, Adjust. I did my due diligence by booking demos and researching a few of them. Ultimately, I landed on ClickCease as the tool of choice to service client accounts.

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud means external parties or robots illegally click on pay-per-click (PPC) ads to exhaust an advertising budget.

“Illegal” – as of this writing, there are no laws against click fraud or ad fraud.

An interesting report by Search Engine Journal in 2021, called The Global PPC Click Fraud Report 2020-21, showed that 11% of all search ad clicks are fraudulent or invalid.

“The lowest level of fraud was found on search ads with only 11% of all clicks being identified as fraudulent. With no monetary gain to be made from clicking other advertisers’ ads, these are the least profitable for fraud rings and gangs – but have huge value for unethical competitors.” (Search Engine Journal, 2021)

ClickCease is a tool that allows us to add layers of security for your Google Ads account to avoid or prevent spam and competitor clicks.

The report includes breakdowns of types of fraud. They found that 17% of fraud clicks come from competitors. What are the odds of your competitors clicking on your ads?

Display Ads are susceptible to click fraud too. According to that article, 36% of display ad clicks are fraudulent. There are owners of websites and apps that use bots to spam click ads on their own site/app.

It also has a considerable effect on web marketing managers like me. Several clients task me with investing their ad spend dollars to produce traffic or conversions. Paid web ad spend has a few key goals.

  • Paid traffic accounts for a percentage of your website’s total traffic and rate of site growth.
  • Paid traffic produces leads for sales (emails, phone calls, web forms).
  • Paid traffic creates brand recognition and top-of-mind visibility via search result pages for chosen keywords or banner ads.

How Does ClickCease Work?

It’s relatively simple. I install the software on your website and Google Ads account. Then, I set up detection rules to monitor click traffic to your ads. The rules allow me to set thresholds.

The software will automatically blacklist an IP address when a user or bot meets those thresholds.

ClickCease is a tool that allows us to add layers of security for your Google Ads account to avoid or prevent spam and competitor clicks.

We can then safely assume that after a user or bot meets those thresholds:

  1. A legitimate potential customer will know if they want to do business with your company
  2. Or, next time they’ll remember your business and search for your company name specifically

A realistic user doesn’t need to see ads beyond those thresholds. Anything beyond them is suspicious.

ClickCease can’t stop the first few clicks of the filter parameters, but bots or competitors don’t usually spam your ads with one or two clicks. They’ll do it progressively over time. ClickCease also can’t tell how many clicks a user would have done because once the software blacklists them from seeing your ads again.

The detection rules don’t end there. We can automatically exclude in mass:

ClickCease is a tool that allows us to add layers of security for your Google Ads account to avoid or prevent spam and competitor clicks.
  • Detect IPs Based on Device IDs
  • Block IPs By Country
  • Block JavaScript disabled browsers
  • VPN Blocking
  • Minimum Seconds on Site
    • Automatically block any IP address that spends less than 5-seconds on your website)
    • In this instance, if they’re spamming fast, your ad will never be shown to them a second time to meet the threshold.

All the above thresholds and parameters can be set per campaign, too!

There’s Nothing New About Click Fraud

Fraud, or some form of it, has existed for a long time. Someone always finds a way to abuse something good. Ecommerce has been growing since the 1990s, and the marketing systems that run them are massive. Online consumer research and web sales grow each year, especially in recent years. Consequently, click fraud grows too.

There is an impact on any business size with any budget for paid web ad spending. However, paid web advertising is a necessary component of any complete marketing ecosystem in any company. ClickCease does a terrific job of making me feel safer about the ad spend that clients entrust me to manage. Therefore, they feel safer knowing ClickCease is in my toolbox to protect their paid click spending dollars.

This tool is only available for clients engaging in full-service management.

First infographic provided by ClickCease.com