Everything you need to know about PPC click forensics
For the past decade, PPC Click Forensics has been one of the most efficient weapons in a growing arsenal of tools used by digital marketers to defend their PPC ads.
What is Click Forensics?
Click forensics is a popular feature of click fraud protection systems. To stay ahead of the constant barrage of invalid traffic, bots, and click fraud that hinders PPC advertising, click fraud protection relies upon a daunting data set to separate the good clicks from the bad.
Click forensics involves painstaking analysis of all data related to the user, including:
Browser fingerprint
IP address
And much, much more.
Device ID
ISP provider
After analyzing the data, click forensics practitioners create automated rules, using a similar system to that in Google Ads.
Why Click Forensics is important
Click Forensics allows you to spot click fraud and bot activity.
Modern click fraud techniques and sophisticated bot attacks mimic natural human behavior to avoid detection. Without careful analysis of both behavior and non-behavior based criteria, it’s impossible to spot – and block - this kind of activity.
Click Forensics provides data to guide your PPC marketing.
Knowing what search terms and geolocations to exclude from your campaigns is as important as knowing what to leave in. Click forensics provided marketers with all the information they needed to make those decisions.
Why Click Forensics isn’t always necessary
A great architect doesn’t lay bricks. A Formula 1 driver doesn’t change tires. And now, an effective PPC marketer doesn’t need to learn PPC click forensics.
The technology that drives ad fraud and click fraud is evolving beyond what consumer-level click forensics tools can handle.
We realized that to provide our customers with sufficient protection, we needed to offer something more. Here’s why we’ve automated ClickGUARD.
Click Forensics is time-consuming.
No matter what your data skill level, post-click analysis requires a level of attention and concentration you could be spending elsewhere. And if you need to take immediate action to protect your ads from an ongoing attack, then you can’t afford to trawl through every click.
Click Forensics is hard to scale.
For larger accounts, or agencies with dozens of clients, the level of traffic makes it even more difficult to conduct thorough forensic processes.
It’s too easy to miss the bigger picture.
Working click-by-click means you can quickly lose sight of larger trends, and forget the wider context of what’s happening in your marketing.
With the right systems, you don’t need Click Forensics.
We’ve created our Advanced Threat Analysis systems to build upon the principles of Click Forensics, providing insight and business intelligence where once there was just raw data.
Can I still check my data in ClickGUARD 2.0?
By all means – the ‘Clicks’ page in ClickGUARD 2.0 allows you to quickly access and filter any click from any campaign. You still access all the data you need, such as IP addresses, device type, geolocation, visit length, or page duration.
But with ClickGUARD 2.0 if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Set your campaign preferences in just a few clicks, and let our automated, data-driven system provide a solution that lets you focus on building your business – while we concentrate on perfecting your click fraud prevention.
Interested in ClickGUARD's solutions? Simply email us at [email protected] and get in touch with a member of our sales team.
