Click fraud is happening when someone clicks on an ad who is not interested in its content, while on the other end, an advertiser is paying for that click. You can imagine that ad networks, like AdSense, or clients who purchase ad space on your site might have a problem with that.
We developed the Click Fraud Protection feature in Advanced Ads Pro to address that issue.
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Why do you need click fraud protection?
Click fraud has two faces. First, when someone “friendly” clicks on those ads to do you a favor. Second, a competitor might click on your ads to raise a red flag with the ad networks or clients and get you banned. Furthermore, it could also happen that you click too often on those ads yourself.
Many ad networks have their protection and might decrease the amount of generated revenue by those invalid clicks. Others might stop working with you.
If you are afraid of that scenario, then our click fraud protection feature might interest you.
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How does it work in Advanced Ads?
The principle of click fraud protection is to hide all ads from a visitor who is suspected of clicking too often on them. As soon as a visitor reaches the defined click limit for one of the ads, Advanced Ads will remove ALL ads for this visitor.
Advanced Ads Pro has global click fraud protection. You can find and enable this module in Advanced Ads > Settings > Pro.
Set the basic options:
- The number of clicks per ad before it is hidden
- The period in which a visitor reaches the click limit before the ad disappears
- How many days a user should not see the ad after he clicked too often
Click fraud protection and Google AdSense ads
The global click fraud protection works for manually embedded AdSense ads and Google AdSense Auto Ads.
A particular behavior here concerns the Anchor ad format of the Auto Ads. When users click on the button to retract or close Anchor ads, Advanced Ads will count these clicks as ad clicks. So they can trigger the click fraud protection too.
Ad-based click fraud protection
We are using a similar technique for our Max. Ad Clicks visitor condition. You can use it if you don’t want general click fraud prevention for all ads or need an ad-specific setup.
Just go to the Visitor Conditions meta box on the ad edit page and add the Max. Ad Clicks option. Advanced Ads will hide the ads from the moment the visitor reached the defined click limit for the specified period.
How to disable click fraud protection
If you stop seeing ads on your website because of a triggered click fraud protection, you can either delete cookies in your browser or disable the Click Fraud Protection module in Advanced Ads > Settings > Pro.
What else do you need to know?
Neither the general nor the individual click limit might not work correctly if your site uses caching. To solve that, you should activate cache busting.
Our click fraud monitoring works in the browser. Therefore, there is no weight on your server. It uses cookies to save the number of clicks per ad. You can reset your browser cookies for testing.
We noticed that the click fraud protection does not let the ad disappear immediately when you click on right and open an ad in a new tab. If clicking with a keyboard modifier (Ctrl + click for new tab), the ad unit disappears correctly.