Ever wondered if your competitors click your PPC ads? Maybe you\u2019ve even considered clicking on your competitors adwords links yourself (naughty naughty). Although a single click here or there is nothing, there\u2019s only one word that can refer to organising a campaign of clicking on competitors ad campaigns. Fraud. Or more specifically, click fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does this really happen in the real world? And what can the cost be to your business? Look at it like this\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In some industries, perhaps yours, the cost per click can be very high. Depending on your business a $20 CPC can seem very cheap, and if you look at our list of most expensive PPC industries<\/a>, you can see that the numbers can really climb. We\u2019re talking more than $100 per click in some fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To highlight that competitor based click fraud really does happen, we have a real life example from a customer of ours. And, believe it or not, this isn\u2019t an isolated case but is in fact worryingly common. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Putting it simply, click fraud is where you receive clicks on your paid ads from parties who have no interest in completing a purchase from you. This can be vindictive, say, to damage or deplete your marketing budget and remove your ad from the results pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It can also be done as part of a more organised campaign to divert your marketing budget to a webmasters account. For example, setting up websites with the sole purpose of making money from display advertising. This is called ad fraud<\/a> and is a whole other subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExplain click fraud to me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n