How to Prevent Fraudulent Traffic to your Website?

This post was most recently updated on November 24th, 2020

Earning a lot with just a click of a button is a modern trend. People have learned how to make use of the virtual world to their benefit and as a result, billions of websites are being created. Billions of advertisers use these websites to advertise their products and a multitude of users search the net every day – which means every publisher or website owner can earn more money.

With this kind of scenario, the bad guys a.k.a. Fraudsters found a way to illegally earn from these publishers by hijacking the traffic. How do they do that? Simple, they infiltrate systems and put a code that can mimic human activity. These are called “bots”. This results in advertisers paying for a campaign that was not seen by real humans.

Being aware of fraudulent traffic can help your site maintain a good and trusted image to the advertisers. This also affects the online advertising industry as a whole. The worst thing that can happen if we continue not to care about this issue is when brands lose confidence in digital media and advertisers will stop using websites as their platform for their advertising.

Getting yourself aware of what fraudulent traffic is can actually save you from all the trouble, and a possible Google account suspension or site banning.

Yes, you read it right. Google can ban your site or your account if they found out that your site is guilty of click fraud. This is highly against their policy. They have both automated systems and human specialists who review, check, and monitor the clicks and impressions of their ads for any invalid activity. Their system uses filters to identify which are artificial activities from the real ones made by a real person, while their team uses tools and specialized techniques to monitor and analyze scenarios.

To help you as a publisher in keeping your sites safe from invalid traffic activity, here are some best practices to try:

1. Know your traffic and visitors. Monitoring your traffic and visitor can help you point out any suspicious behavior and stop it immediately. You can achieve this via any web analytics tool, like Google Analytics.

Related Read: How to Find Adsense Insights and Trends in Google Analytics

2. Stop and don’t partner with untrusted parties. Do not settle with poor quality ad networks or other parties just to increase your site’s traffic. You’ll surely regret it in the end as their traffic bulk could be unsafe and suspicious.

3. You may think it’s okay, but clicking your own ad is not allowed so do not do it!

4. Always check your ad implementations. Make sure that your site is complying with Google’s Policy when it comes to ad implementation. You can refer to the link below for Google’s Ad Placement Policy: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en

          Related Read: Top AdSense Ad Violations

5. If you are using AdSense or Ad Exchange, make sure that all your sites are authorized to use their ad code to ensure that all the stats for the ads that show on your page will be charged.

6. Lastly, a recommendation from Monetizemore.com, integrate a traffic suppression technology on your site. If you have a big and stable site, you can use Forensiq, but if you are just starting up your site and not yet earning that much, a better alternative for you is Cloudflare.

Before you get yourself into trouble because of fraudulent traffic, learn more about it, stay away from possible causes, and try out the best practices stated above. You can also contact us so we can discuss more it and help you keep your traffic safe.

Book your free consultation with MonetizeMore today!

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Kean Graham

Kean Graham is the CEO and founder of MonetizeMore & a pioneer in the Adtech Industry. He is the resident expert in Ad Optimization, covering areas like Adsense Optimization,GAM Management, and third-party ad network partnerships. Kean believes in the supremacy of direct publisher deals and holistic optimization as keys to effective and consistent ad revenue increases.