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Click & Bot Fraud: The Spookiest Specters of PPC

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click bot fraud the spookiest specters of ppc

I was working in the office late one night when my eyes beheld an eerie sight. For a monster from my account began to rise and suddenly, to my surprise…

A spooky silhouette of a black cat.

He did not do any kind of monster-themed dance, because he was a bot spending my ad budget on fraudulent clicks. If click fraud has happened to you, you know it can be pretty scary. But have no fear, I’m here to let you know how to identify click fraud in your account and what you can do to combat it. 

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud, also known as ad fraud, is the fraudulent clicking or viewing of pay-per-click ads. This invalid activity can drive up the perceived number of clicks on an ad and along with, the cost. According to the Association of National Advertisers, the impact of ad fraud is estimated to be $5.8 billion this year. Ad fraud can happen anywhere and isn’t just limited to search. Display, video, and even social ads can be subject to fraudulent clicks. Just this August, Facebook sued two developers for creating apps infected with malware that falsified clicks. The bottom line is that click fraud messes with your data and your money, and as a PPC nerd (and a cheapskate), nobody messes with my data or my money. Let’s explore who these click fraud creeps are and how they highjack your ads. 

The Creeps of Click Fraud

A grumpy looking gargoyle

1.Web Publishers

Web publishers make 68% of the amount paid to Google for that ad, so the more clicks, the more money. Many publishers rely solely on the revenue they make from advertising and so may be tempted to click on an ad on their website to increase revenue. However, publishers who do this risk losing their partnership status with Google. Google also monitors 3rd party affiliates’ web traffic to make sure their ad clicks and impressions are valid.

2. Click Farms

Click farm sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Like maybe it’s the place your ad goes to rest when it’s past its prime. Unfortunately, the reality of click farms is much sadder. Click farms are sort of like the sweatshops of pay-per-click. Companies can buy likes or followers for their social media pages to boost their presence in hopes of encouraging real consumers to buy. Sometimes companies even buy clicks for their competitor’s ads to exhaust their ad budget. Unfortunately, the companies and orchestrators of click farms profit while those working in them are paid very little and usually operate in pretty poor working conditions. 

3. Bots

Bots are the most common perpetrator of ad and click fraud. Bots are sophisticated malware that act like human traffic on a site and can simulate clicks, impressions, and site visits. The creators of the bots then create fraudulent websites to host ads where the bots will simulate traffic. Methbot, one of the largest bot fraud operations to date, was discovered in 2016 by White Ops cybersecurity. Using over 500,000 IPs and 6,000 domains to cover its tracks, Methbot was making its creators as much as $5 million a day. 

How Do You Know If You’re Experiencing Click Fraud?

Okay, now that I’ve scared you a little bit, let me tell you how to determine if you’re the target of click fraud and what to do about it. Here are some key indicators that something suspicious is going on:

1. Click-Through Rates Have Gone Through the Roof

If you’re seeing your click-through rate spike out of nowhere, you might want to take a peek in Google Analytics and see where that traffic is coming from. It’s possible that you just launched a great ad, and if that’s the case, congrats! However, if your traffic is coming from countries that you don’t serve or you have an unusually high bounce rate, you may be the target of click fraud. Not sure what a reasonable click-through rate is? Check our Associate Director of Search Matt Umbro’s article.

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2. Weird Referral Traffic 

While you’re in Google Analytics, take a look at your referral traffic. If it seems like there are some odd or irrelevant traffic referring users to your site, it could be a bot. Bryan Gaynor, Senior Digital Marketing Account Manager at Hanapin Marketing, has a great article on what to do when you see this kind of traffic.

3. Take a Look at Incoming IP Addresses

If you’re particularly worried about click fraud or you’re experiencing the symptoms listed above, take a look at the IP addresses of the users visiting your site. PPC Protect explains exactly how to do that. If you keep seeing the same IP addresses over and over again, especially within a short time frame, this could mean click fraud. 

4. If You’re In the Finance, Family, or Food Industry

No, fraudsters aren’t just targeting industries that start with ‘F’. What these industries have in common is a high average cost per click and lot’s of traffic, which means click criminals can make a lot of money and go relatively unnoticed. It’s estimated that between 16-22% of the traffic to these industries’ sites are bots. Luckily for most other industries, bot traffic makes up less than 10% of their traffic.

Combatting Click Fraud 

A knight preparing to defend your PPC account.

  Click fraud is scary, that’s why we waited until October to write this article. Even though it’s frightening to think about what creeps could be stealing your advertising dollars, it’s not a reason to stop PPC completely. With 3 billion people spending an average of 23 hours a week surfing the internet, you miss risking out on lots of revenue and new customers if you’re not showing up online. Just like you wouldn’t close down your brick and mortar store for fear of shoplifting, you wouldn’t stop doing digital advertising. 

 Luckily, there are many ways that click and bot fraud is being combatted. Platforms like Google and Facebook are increasing their vigilance and have become more litigious in recent years when it comes to combating click farms. Google has also launched it’s Ad Traffic Quality Center to help inform digital advertisers and provide options for requesting invalid traffic investigations. One of the best ways to be vigilant in detecting click fraud or unusual traffic is to segment your ad campaigns and be intentional in your targeting. If you know what kind of traffic is normal and what your users should look like, you’ll be able to detect click and bot fraud much faster. 

 If you’re still worried or belong to one of the industries at risk listed above, you might consider looking into vendors like ClickCease and PPCProtect to help keep an eye on your traffic. Armed with this knowledge about click fraud, you’re safer already.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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