How Competitors Use Bots and Fake Traffic to Attack Retail Sites

Your PPC ads are getting a lot of clicks, which seems like great news, right?

Not so fast.

Around 40% of all internet traffic is invalid, including botnets, scrapers, click farms, fake accounts, and other types of invalid traffic (IVT). This influx of fake traffic can harm your marketing funnel, lower the efficiency of your paid campaigns, reduce on-site conversion rates, and compromise the accuracy of your analytics.

Ad fraud, which includes competitor click fraud, cost marketers $54 billion in 2023 alone. If you don't actively protect your business from IVT, you risk wasting your ad budget without achieving meaningful results.

Here’s what you need to know about competitor click fraud, how to detect it, and how to protect your business from losses.

What Is Competitor Click Fraud?

Competitor click fraud is when a rival business intentionally clicks on your online ads (like those on Google Ads) to generate invalid traffic to your site. This tactic can affect any business, but eCommerce and retail companies are among the hardest hit. It's estimated that click fraud will cost online retailers $71 Billion by the end of 2024.

IVT can also corrupt your audience data and distort your look-alike models and automation pixels, undermining your overall marketing strategy.

Why Do Competitors Commit Click Fraud?

The primary objective of competitor click fraud is to waste your money and reduce your ability to compete for ad placements. Unscrupulous competitors use this tactic to inflate your costs for certain keywords, draining your PPC budget with fake clicks. With less budget to spend on genuine traffic, you become less competitive, potentially losing your market position.

How Does Competitor Click Fraud Work?

Competitor click fraud involves more than just occasional, manual clicks on your ads to cost you a few dollars. While smaller-scale manual click fraud does occur, especially among small businesses, larger-scale operations often use sophisticated, automated, or outsourced methods to cause extensive damage while evading detection.

In-house Clicks:
Manual click fraud is often a concern for smaller businesses, where one business might intentionally click on another's ads to drain their PPC budget. Sometimes, this is an informal practice within a company, where employees are subtly encouraged to sabotage competitors.

Click Farms or Bot Farms:
Some companies outsource click fraud to click farms, where thousands of human workers repeatedly engage with ads with no intent to convert. These operations often masquerade as "engagement boosters" but primarily profit from click fraud.

Click Bot Software:
Competitors can purchase software for click fraud, often for less than $200 a month. These tools use proxies, VPNs, and other techniques to generate fake traffic and avoid detection. Advanced software can even mimic human behaviors, like mouse movements and scrolling, to bypass security checks like reCAPTCHA.

Botnets:
Technically savvy competitors may use botnets, which are networks of hijacked internet devices used to carry out automated tasks. Despite their reputation for complex attacks, botnets can be surprisingly easy to assemble and are highly effective for click fraud. They generate invalid traffic from thousands of different "real" devices, making it difficult to detect patterns.

How to Detect Competitor Click Fraud

If you suspect your PPC campaigns are being sabotaged, you can take several steps to identify fraudulent activity:

• Check IP addresses: examine your visitor logs for repeated clicks from the same IP addresses or locations outside your target audience.
• Review your publisher list: look for signs that your ads are appearing on Pay-to-Click (PTC) sites, which often feature irrelevant content and recently registered domains.
• Monitor campaign activities: watch for unusual spikes in click volume or other suspicious patterns, like high bounce rates and clicks from unfamiliar devices.
• Identify patterns: collaborate with other local retailers to identify patterns that could reveal click fraud.

How to Stop Competitor Click Fraud

If you determine that you're a victim of click fraud, you can take several manual steps to mitigate the damage:

• Set up IP and ISP exclusions.
• Focus your ad budget on remarketing campaigns.
• Exclude specific locations, demographics, and devices from your targeting.
• Restrict your ad placements to reputable sites.

However, manual detection and prevention have limitations. Tracking suspicious activities can be costly and time-consuming, and by the time you notice them, the damage may already be done.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tackle this problem alone. Fraud protection software can help detect and block fraudulent activities before they drain your ad budget.

For example, Tapper’s Intelligence Engine runs over 2,000 real-time security checks on every site visit. When it detects a suspicious IP address, device, or VPN, it blocks the source automatically.

Tapper offers three components to combat click fraud:

• Bot mitigation engine: blocks invalid bot activity using advanced fingerprinting methods and multi-layered security.
• User validation engine: conducts real-time tests to identify users trying to mask their identities.
• Behavioral analysis engine: monitors both network-wide and individual activity for anomalies.

By blocking IVT, you can focus your budget on genuine traffic, maximize revenue opportunities, and clean up your data for more accurate audience targeting in future campaigns.