5 top brands showing killer KPI success in eliminating click fraud
Jonathan Marciano
|Marketing | August 30, 2020
Marketers are signing up thick and fast to protect their digital ad spending using CHEQ. It may be because we are the only way to protect all your digital advertising spend, whether you are spending on Google Ads, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Snapchat.
It may be because we are entirely transparent, not bullshitting anyone about levels of invalid clicks on their campaigns (We supply log-level data, user agent, IP addresses, and time stamps for every single instance of fraud, so we can be checked).
It may be because we are cool – Dikembe Mutombo is our Chief Blocking Officer! Or have won lots of awards, such as Best Search Software 2020. Or, that we bring advanced cybersecurity filtration based on more than 1,000 cybersecurity parameters to the complex world of online ad campaigns.
Better ad spend during COVID-19
Ultimately, we suspect people are tackling rampant click fraud at a time when marketers are justifying every single dollar of spend. CEOs and boards are conscious of every dollar spent. Marketing budgets are at risk if this value is not shown. Putting money into invalid clicks and serving bots is even harder to stomach when finances are under the microscope and when real (human) customers desperately need to be ushered into your funnel. Bots running rife is no longer acceptable. Bots, of course, do not need software management solutions, or do online shopping, or drink beer.
Let’s talk KPIs
Clients give it to us straight. None straighter than this client (who spends $500,000 a month on paid search and paid social campaigns). “I want to see a measurable increase in my internal KPI’s. Nothing else- not even a fever dream featuring the Virgin Mary herself telling me to sign up – will garner interest.”
Other KPIs reflect other clients’ pressures: One says: “We want to see raised install rates from low CVR (3%-6%) to average CVR (15%-20%)”; “I need to see at least a 10% decrease in CPA”; or “better demo success” (bots are notorious no-shows on demos).
This is the sort of thing we love to hear on our calls, as we like to unveil what is truly happening in campaigns and provide a fast fix to better ROI. With that in mind, here are five recent cases where we are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars through cybersecurity fraud prevention. This shows the results that are possible from eliminating click fraud following a five-minute implementation.
1. Bots don’t buy glasses
This global glasses and contact lenses supplier spends $300,000 annually on media buying across multiple PPC channels. CHEQ found between 8% to 98% (!) invalid clicks on some of their campaigns.
In one month, a specific platform saw 12,000 fraudulent clicks. 25% of clicks generated throughout the campaign were completely invalid. An additional $3,500 was wasted in retargeting bots that had visited the site. This helps to shine a light on a global $1.4 billion eCommerce click fraud problem.
2. Bots don’t get zits
A top skin care brand saw its campaigns beaten with VPN and data center malicious traffic. In fact, 95% of visits for one campaign arrived from data centers, and 5% originated from proxy/VPNs based on users who were clearly out of geo and would not have been included in the client’s campaign targeting. In one month of using CHEQ this led to $80,000 savings, reinvested in safe inventory.
3. Bots don’t travel
This company spent (pre-COVID-19) $ 7 million a month on paid search and paid social media channels. They suffered poor conversion rates. In particular, our cybersecurity protection found significant affiliate fraud – driving 15% of fraud to the site, but the users were not converting. In addition, we identified five malicious app partners. There were also 5,000 invalid clicks on their confirmation pages, indicating “chargeback fraud,” where bots make a transaction and then seek a refund. Bots were also generating fictitious reviews damaging their brand. The bots were blocked.
4. Bots don’t do DIY
A DIY marketplace spending $2.5 million a month came to us after suffering highly unusual visits. Analyzing the campaigns, more than 60% of the traffic originated from malicious data centers. In one month, 620,000 bots visited the site creating 46,000 invalid clicks. Campaigns saw 14,000 invalid clicks from VPN use to mask locations, primarily coming from China and Malaysia, masking their location as UK buyers (the former countries deemed invalid ad buys by the client as they do not ship to these regions). In addition, their campaigns were attacked by operation system spoofing. Here, the potential customer’s browsers were declaring them as Android Mobile Web users, but CHEQ’s 1000 cybersecurity challenges carried out in milliseconds uncovered they were desktop users, indicative of fraud.
5. Bots don’t use medical devices
In another case, a multinational medical device company was finding poor conversion on their campaigns. More than 700 bots attempted to visit their site through various paid search and paid social campaigns, 102 of them attempting to return over 400 times. Some 32% of all fraud from their campaigns was driven from data centers. The majority (more than 50%) of the data center related fraud was targeting one platform in particular. Indeed healthcare marketers are set to lose a massive $196 million due to click fraud in 2020.
These results are being provided for almost any customer in any industry. This is because fraudsters are stepping up their game launching more sophisticated attacks against ad budgets as a result of COVID-19. It takes just 5 minutes to set up CHEQ implementing JavaScript using your tag manager, protecting all your paid ad channels, including social media and Google Search.
Please get in touch today. We want to hear your KPIs, and see if we can help reach them by eliminating click fraud from your campaigns.