Competitors and AdWord Marketing
Google advertisers are often concerned about the risk of competitors affecting their business by clicking on their AdWords ads. In fact, we have even spoken to businesses that are so concerned about this they are reluctant to advertise in Google at all due to this. The objective of this piece is to make customers aware of the problems of Google AdWords and how we advise them to avoid these issues to maximize their profits.
The truth is, yes, it is likely that competitors will click on your ads. They do this with the intention of disrupting your advertising schemes by adding to the cost of their AdWords campaigns and reducing their profits. This can be an issue for companies looking to advertise using this strategy.
From our extensive experience working with customers from diverse backgrounds, we have found that approximately 5 to 10% of campaign clicks are invalid. This can be a real concern for our customers as this might cost them considerable money.
How do we know this?
Google AdWords is designed with these malicious clicks in mind and has a built-in fraudulent click filter. This identifies invalid click activity such as competitors trying to sabotage marketing schemes. These fraudulent clicks are then automatically credited against your account each month, so you don’t actually pay anything for this activity. This means their activities will not cost you any money and just wastes their time.
What is our advice on this situation? We advise companies not to worry about these underhanded tactics from their competitors who have nothing better to do than click on your ads. Thanks to the filter provided by Google AdWords, their activities will very likely be filtered out and not charged against you, meaning that for all their efforts they will have just wasted their own time and have not cost you anything. The likelihood of these clicks costing you money is very low, and so we recommend our customers continue to use Google AdWords in their marketing campaigns.
However, if you are still concerned there are steps you can take to prevent their actions against you. One of the best ways would be set up an IP address filter in your AdWords campaigns that exclude certain IP addresses. Doing this will allow you to prevent users from the IP addresses of fraudulent clickers from seeing any of your adverts, meaning it is impossible for them to click on them and cause you problems. This is the best way to avoid fraudulent clicks entirely.
Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not currently report website visitor activity at an IP address level, so you will not be able to identify the IP addresses of fraudulent clickers from Google. Instead, you will have to use a different programme such as Clicky to obtain this level of information. This will require a number of additional steps, but this can be worth it for the peace of mind that malicious clicks will be removed from your campaign.
The Bluelight Marketing agency has more than 5 years of experience in Google Ads marketing and over 100+ successful campaigns under management, book a free consultation today and learn how we can help you.
Nick Berns is at the helm of the Bluelight agency. With 6 years of experience in digital marketing, he is passionate about growing businesses through organic and paid marketing solutions.
