3 Ways to Use Verification for Superior PPC Optimisation

Successful PPC optimisation relies on accurate data. The presence of invalid traffic renders campaign data unreliable, misdirects optimisation efforts and ultimately prevents your PPC advertising from reaching its full potential. This means that verification is one of the most important steps in your optimisation efforts.
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Here are three ways TrafficGuard’s PPC fraud prevention can help your advertising optimisation:
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1. Proactively preventing fraud from taking your budget (without stopping real traffic!)

Preventing invalid traffic is the first and easiest step in PPC campaign optimisation.

As soon as TrafficGuard detects a source of invalid traffic in your Google Ads traffic, it automatically adds it to your Google Ads IP or placement exclusion list in Google Ads for you. This stops your campaigns from being shown to these bad sources. Invalid traffic is prevented before it hits your ad spend or pollutes your performance data – giving you accurate reporting for optimisation while also ensuring that every dollar is going towards reaching your target audience.

Just as important as stopping invalid traffic is making sure real ad engagement isn’t caught in the crossfire. Unlike some other solutions, false positives don’t fly with us. User behaviour data collected by TrafficGuard fuels our proprietary propensity to convert algorithms. This ensures that IPs and placements that send valid traffic aren’t excluded from your campaigns and false positives aren’t able to impact your campaigns.
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2. Giving you the real picture of your advertising traffic

Whether you analyse your campaigns in Google Ads or with other analytics tools, the presence of invalid traffic remains. So if you are using your Google Ads data to analyse performance and determine the best performing keywords, ad groups or advertising creatives, invalid traffic is potentially misdirecting your efforts.

Something most fraud protection solutions don’t like to admit is that even with the prevention, there will always be some invalid traffic in your PPC campaigns. That is because some sources of invalid traffic also deliver genuine traffic that could be real customers – so it’s important that these sources aren’t stopped from seeing your ads. Despite this, you still need to know what is real and what is invalid – because any presence of invalid traffic skews the metrics you use to guide optimisation.

TrafficGuard gives you an unprecedented level of visibility into your traffic quality across your Google Ads campaigns. The ability to compare campaigns, ad groups, keywords and creatives give you an understanding of true performance with verified traffic to guide your optimisation efforts.
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3. Enabling you to set your own invalidation rules – so you can spend your ad dollars more effectively

There is no question that bidding on your own brand name and defending that search real estate from competitors is essential to most successful search strategies. However, for some specific types of businesses with high-frequency visitors, search advertising can be the front door that people use over and over again to enter your site. eCommerce and services provided through web apps are particularly vulnerable to this type of budget draining behaviour.

The main purpose of brand campaigns is to make it as easy as possible for potential customers still in the decision-making phase to get to your site and give them less opportunity to be distracted by a competitors ad. But already loyal customers click ads too – because they appear at the top of the search results, so it’s the easiest way to get to your site. Some customers are habitually navigating through your ads to get to your website oblivious to the fact that they are clicking ads.

This engagement, while clearly not malicious, is still recognised as invalid by industry standards including Google itself, which restrict layouts that promote this behaviour in their publisher guidelines. So how do you rectify this without compromising the main purpose of your brand campaigns? TrafficGuard’s behavioural reporting gives you an understanding of the frequency at which individual users arrive at your site via advertising. Then using TrafficGuard’s custom invalidation rules, you can set a threshold to exclude your ads from displaying to these users. This ensures that less budget is wasted displaying advertising to people who are already heading to your site, and more budget is available to reach new customers.

Note: These thresholds vary widely for different types of business. So, before you set custom invalidation rules, it is important to have a solid understanding of what is normal and abnormal in your own traffic.
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Conclusion

Preventing invalid traffic and stopping your ads from being shown to sources with no potential to deliver ROI is the key to driving better performance.

TrafficGuard not only ensures that your campaigns are protected from bots, fraudsters, accidental clicks and other invalid sources but also arms you with complete transparency of real performance so you can get the best possible advertising performance from your investment.

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