Great article in MarketingSherpa about how to identify and avoid click-fraud i.e. where you end up paying for someone to either erroneously or maliciously click on your pay-per-click ad.

Competitors, employees, customers and blatant fraudsters can all bring about click-fraud. It may be accidental or malicious, and it tends to be more common in highly competitive industries.

Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest offers some great advice in the MarketingSherpa article for how to identify and avoid click fraud. Among other things, Mr Myers offers these three tips for avoiding, or at least reducing the instance of, click-fraud:

1. Avoid ad networks, since click-fraud is more prevalent on ad networks rather than in the search engines.
2. Identify the IP addresses of your key competitors. This will allow you to see if you’re getting a lot of clicks from them. You can then ask them to ‘cease and desist’.
3. Identify your company’s IP address. Although it’s known as ‘fraud’ a lot of click-through fraud is really just ‘click-through ignorance’ - where employees click on your ads out of interest rather than spite. Deterring employees from clicking on your PPC ads may be a simple matter of explaining that you pay each time they click (and that you’ll dock their pay the next time they do it… only kidding!)

Check out the article (free account required) for more helpful advice about the causes of click-fraud and how to detect and avoid it.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Crack Down On Click Fraud: How To Identify, Monitor, Prevent It: Red Flags and Links”, MarketingSherpa