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The Top 8 Click Fraud Protection Solutions

Explore the Top Click Fraud Protection solutions known for their advanced detection algorithms, real-time monitoring, and analytics features to safeguard digital advertising campaigns from fraudulent activities.

Last updated on Jun 24, 2024
Joel Witts
Laura Iannini
Written by Joel Witts Technical Review by Laura Iannini
The Top 8 Click Fraud Protection Software include:
  1. 1.
    CHEQ ClickCease
  2. 2.
    ClickGUARD
  3. 3.
    Cloudflare Bot Management
  4. 4.
    FraudScore
  5. 5.
    Improvely

Click fraud protection solutions enables marketing teams and agencies to monitor, block and measure fake clicks in digital ad campaigns, especially pay-per-click (PPC). Fake clicks and bot traffic can dangerously distort digital marketing data, inflating cost and making it very difficult to accurately track campaign performance. Click fraud protection tools monitor PPC platforms to identify non-genuine traffic and provide additional click insights for marketing teams. 

Click fraud protection solutions works by integrating with digital ad platforms and monitoring click traffic, using advanced algorithms and heuristics to identify unusual click patterns or suspicious behavior. When identified, these fraudulent clicks can be blocked in real-time from reports. The best solutions will provide detailed breakdowns of click data, and additional contexts to help teams make the most of their digital ad spend. They help teams to increase their Return On Investment (ROI), save time & resources, and strengthen their overall digital advertising strategy.

The market for click fraud protection software has grown increasingly competitive, with numerous providers offering features such as real-time blocking, advanced analytics, and detailed reports. In this guide, we will explore into the top click fraud protection software available on the market, evaluating them based on their features, ease of use, pricing, and customer feedback. 

ClickCease is a click fraud detection platform focused on the detection and prevention of impression and click fraud. The product addresses the issue of invalid, fake and bot traffic, helping to increase return on ad spend (ROAS) by ensuring reporting data is accurate and maximizing genuine human clicks on ads.

The ClickCease platform monitors and blocks click fraud across major ad platforms. It also provides customization options for fraud filters, learning from specific ad campaigns to offer protection improvement suggestions. ClickCease gives users comprehensive insight into click specifics including device types, keywords triggering maximum clicks, blocked reasons, and site visitor video replays. ClickCease also provides comprehensive, 24/7 customer support.

ClickCease works across Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and WordPress websites. It helps people to successfully monitor fraudulent clicks caused by bot clicks, competitor clicks, fake clicks, click farms, and brand haters, thereby protecting and enhancing the efficiency of businesses’ digital advertising budgets. The company is committed to data protection and privacy, observing GDPR and CCPA guidelines.

1.

CHEQ ClickCease

CHEQ ClickCease Logo

ClickGUARD is a robust click fraud protection solutions that analyzes a broad array of data points including IP addresses, user device IDs, geolocation, as well as previous and current behaviour to ensure bot-free clicks. A stand-out feature is the Bot Probability Assessment which provides detailed insights into each unique click, determining the time spent on site and more. The platform can then monitor or block the click source, per the campaign’s protection parameters.

ClickGuard provides effective protection from click fraud. To counter bot networks, ClickGUARD verifies each click, and generates a dynamic threat-specific database for your Google Ads account. The user interface is accessible and transparent, simplifying the process of reporting and consolidating data. Users can easily view their campaigns’ status and take definitive action on fake clicks within a few second. Users can view and export reports, filtering by click status, conversion status, engagement level, and campaign.

ClickGUARD aims to eliminate false clicks from competitors, bots and click farms, ensuring accurate conversion rates and the acquisition of quality leads necessary for business growth. The company provides comprehensive protection against false clicks, serving to increase PPC conversion, leading to more sales and better leads.

2.

ClickGUARD

ClickGUARD Logo

Cloudflare is a leading bot management and protection solution. It is used globally for its ability to block harmful and spam bots, while delivering smooth and reliable website hosting. It targets malicious bots that could potentially compromise sensitive data, affect revenues, and tarnish brand reputation. By deploying Cloudflare, businesses can manage traffic from good and bad bots in real-time, using data from its vast network of internet properties.

Cloudflare uses behavioral analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting to identify and block bot traffic. Cloudflare’s fingerprinting is extracted from a vast array of Internet properties to classify bots with high accuracy, ensuring user privacy by not generating or storing device fingerprints. This robust evaluation mechanism for every request made to your web properties ensures reliable and effective bot prevention.

Cloudflare offers seamless deployment, low latency performance, with rich analytics and logs for enhanced security posture. It can recommend rules to manage bots without requiring complicated configurations or external JavaScript adjustments. Cloudflare also enables flexibility with finely-tuned bot management rules.

Cloudflare also provides protection for mobile applications and APIs, in addition to offering customization bots. Cloudflare is trusted by millions of Internet properties worldwide, highlighting their reliability and efficacy in enhancing online security.

3.

Cloudflare Bot Management

Cloudflare Bot Management Logo

FraudScore provides a comprehensive solution for ad networks and agencies to ensure traffic quality in their advertising campaigns. FraudScore provides traffic analysis across different stages of the advertising funnel, with an emphasis on earlier fraud detection for cleaner performance data. This enables organizations to reduce the cost of analytics tools and improve optimization processes. Ad agencies can filter fraudulent clicks and poor performing campaigns to sustain a trustworthy reputation with their clients.

The platform supports both mobile and desktop traffic and has integrated compatibility with Adjust and Appsflyer 360 Rejections. With the provision of personal training and expert support for User Acquisition (UA) and analytics teams, FraudScore offers extensive assistance throughout reject processes with traffic sources. Users can prepare detailed reports and provide transparent reasoning for every rejected conversion for their stakeholders.

In terms of technical capabilities, FraudScore applies advanced traffic pattern recognition to identify a wide range of affiliate fraud types including spam clicks, VPNs & Proxies, duplicate IPs, and incentivized traffic. It incorporates machine learning analysis to surpass traditional rules-based algorithms in fraud detection. The platform also allows for seamless integration with popular AdTech platforms and supports custom integrations for in-house solutions via an easy-to-use API.

4.

FraudScore

FraudScore Logo

Improvely provides digital ad campaign reporting and click fraud detection. Improvely’s continuous monitoring system detects and reports potentially fraudulent activity such as non-converting clicks from certain locations or repeated clicks from a competitor. The platform provides comprehensive reports detailing fake or low-quality clicks and the necessary information required to report it to the relevant search engine or advertisement site.

Improvely assists in the prevention of click fraud by redirecting suspicious clicks to a warning page, thereby alerting the clickers while protecting the users’ website. It also provides the IP addresses for all fake clicks, enabling marketing teams to prevent these addresses from accessing their ads in the future.

Beyond its fraud detection and prevention capacity, Improvely also provides advanced conversion tracking and conversion attribution. This feature shows where conversions and revenues are generated, which, in turn, allows for more efficient marketing strategies and minimal spending on low-converting traffic. To enhance these capabilities, Improvely even offers built-in A/B testing tools, real-time updated dashboards with crucial metrics, and custom-built funnel reports to review user conversion paths.

5.

Improvely

Improvely Logo

IPQualityScore provides click fraud detection tools and solutions, designed to detect and prevent abusive bots or fraudulent users on digital platforms. The company offers real-time fraud scoring, validating user credentials, and bot detection technology that screen user activities without affecting their experience. Their platform generates instant click analytics reports outlining click and enquiry details.

IPQualityScore considers multiple risk factors to prevent false transactions from occurring. With machine learning algorithms and data analysts, IPQualityScore can identify patterns of abuse, detect fraudulent transactions, and detect identity theft among other risks. Implementing the platform is straightforward, with typical integration taking under five minutes.

IPQualityScore offers bot protection technology that can identify non-human users in real-time to prevent bot traffic from reaching your platform. This can significantly reduce the occurrence of fake accounts, content scraping, and other forms of abusive behavior. IPQualityScore also offers “Fraud Scoring”, an alert system that detects high-risk digital behavior and stolen user data.

In addition to its anti-fraud suite, IPQualityScore provides IP Lookup & Proxy Detection, Email Validation, Phone Validation, and Spam Trap Removal. These tools enhance user verification and screening against abusive behavior. Overall, IPQualityScore’s fraud detection tools provide a comprehensive protective barrier against harmful digital engagement and fraudulent activities.

6.

IPQualityScore (IPQS)

IPQualityScore (IPQS) Logo

Lunio is a marketing tool that helps businesses optimize their advertising budgets by focusing on real conversions. The solution can effectively prevent fake traffic, bots, and eliminate false ad engagements across multiple advertisement channels.

Lunio captures and analyzes ad traffic data to block invalid traffic, preventing unnecessary budget spend on fraudulent clicks. The software also provides post-click traffic behavior analysis and conversion data which aids in refining audience targeting.

The tool is designed to improve the quality of your marketing data by eliminating false clicks and filtering invalid traffic from campaign reporting. Lunio’s automated feature swiftly detects and categorizes fake clicks on paid campaign ads. The platform automatically filters non-value traffic, enhancing conversion data and improving valid campaign targeting.

Lunio supports integration with all major ad platforms and provides visibility over IP addresses, device types, regions, and traffic health for individual keywords and campaigns. The convenience of its one-click integration, accurate targeting, multi-platform protection, and tailored marketing support means that the tool is a strong a strategic choice for businesses looking to optimize their marketing data.

7.

Lunio

Lunio Logo

TrafficGuard is an ad fraud detection platform for marketing campaigns across various platforms. It operates across the full marketing funnel, providing three layers of fraud protection that extend from click to conversion.

The platform features campaign optimization measures, powered by their proprietary Reputation IQ database, ensuring consistent traffic quality. It prevents campaign bidding on non-viewable or invalid placements and prevents fake traffic with real-time click validation. It also verifies attribution in real-time before any sources are notified.

TrafficGuard enables custom rule-setting to tailor audience parameters. Users can exclude traffic from specific sites, IP addresses, devices, platforms, or even countries. The platform accommodates any business type, channel, or campaign model for a more flexible marketing approach.

In addition to its fraud protection capabilities, TrafficGuard offers data analytics to help address data quality issues and optimize campaign tracking. The benefits of this platform include improved conversion rates, bounce rates, and ROAS, along with reduced CPA.

8.

TrafficGuard

TrafficGuard Logo
The Top 8 Click Fraud Protection Solutions

Everything You Need To Know About Click Fraud Protection Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Click Fraud Protection Solutions?

Click fraud protection software are tools that monitor digital marketing campaigns and remove fake traffic and clicks. They typically integrate with digital advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Meta Ads to identify and classify fraudulent clicks that may originate from bots, competitors, or publishers. They can also monitor and report on duplicate clicks, low quality clicks from non-buyers, and clicks from non-target locations.

Click fraud protection solutions include a range of key features, including the ability to automatically flag and block suspicious traffic from appearing in your marketing reports. This enables marketing teams to monitor the overall effectiveness and Return On Investment (ROI) for pay-per-click campaigns across different marketing platforms more accurately. They can also display additional click information, such as user IP addresses, ISPs, and devices.

Large pay-per-click tech platforms such as Google have sophisticated machine learning systems in place to prevent bot-traffic from appearing in Keyword reports or Google Analytics, but some fraudulent traffic can still appear in reports. The list above focuses on third-party tools designed to give marketing teams additional confidence and monitoring for fraudulent click traffic.

What Is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is the process of sending fake “click traffic” to a web page or URL. This is usually designed to inflate the numbers in a digital marketing campaign, most commonly a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. This can make it hugely difficult for marketing teams to accurately assess the performance and ROI of a PPC campaign and can sometimes mean organizations are overpaying for fake traffic.

Click fraud specifically indicates malicious intent. This could be a competitor clicking your links to increase campaign costs, or an unscrupulous publisher trying to artificially inflate their campaign performance numbers. Bot networks also play a huge role, sending out mass amounts of fake traffic. It’s hard to know exactly how prevalent malicious click fraud is, with some research estimating that 90% of Google and Bing pay-per-click campaigns are affected.

Not all fake clicks are malicious, however. There are also issues of the same user clicking on links multiple times, non-malicious bot networks such as webpage crawlers or simply users browsing who never had any intention of making a purchase. For example, a service only available in North America would not need to receive traffic from eastern Europe.

It’s important for digital marketing teams to have a way of factoring click fraud into their reports so they can more accurately track campaign performance and PPC spend. Click fraud protection solutions can be an effective way to monitor fake clicks and improve overall reporting data quality.

How Do Click Fraud Protection Solutions work?

Click fraud protection solutions integrate with advertising platforms to monitor all click and traffic data. Using fraudulent click detection algorithms, they will automatically detect, flag and block instances of malicious clicks. Some leading solutions use machine learning to flag suspicious click data more accurately.

Fraud protection solutions provide detailed breakdowns into click traffic and the best solutions will provide a timeline view of clicks, with additional context such as IP address, device, and location, where available. They should block fake clicks in real-time, provide automated scheduled reporting, and flag suspicious behaviors in a clear reporting console.

What Features Should You Look For In Click Fraud Protection Solutions?

Click fraud protection solutions should be easy-to-use, adaptable across your marketing channels, and make it very easy to access comprehensive marketing reports. The best tools will offer an intuitive, easy-to-use admin console, with shared team access for key stakeholders. Key features to consider when choosing a click fraud protection solution include:

  • Real-Time Click Monitoring: Real-time monitoring of all clicks to identify suspicious behaviors
  • Suspicious Activity Reports: Reports and breakdowns into suspicious click activity
  • Contextual Click Information: Detail into click types (unique, bot, competitor), IP address, device, referral URL, location etc
  • Comprehensive Reporting: Clear reporting into all suspected fake clicks, with easy export to share with marketing partners
  • Admin Console: A clear, modern admin console with role-based team access
  • Integrations: Fast and easy integration with your PPC campaigns and other marketing tools.
  • Customizable Reporting and Policies: Custom reports and policies controls
  • Click Blocking: Some click fraud solutions enable you to block bots and fake clicks from visiting your landing pages
Written By

Joel Witts is the Content Director at Expert Insights, meaning he oversees all articles published and topics covered. He is an experienced journalist and writer, specialising in identity and access management, Zero Trust, cloud business technologies, and cybersecurity. Joel is a co-host of the Expert Insights Podcast and conducts regular interviews with leading B2B tech industry experts, including directors at Microsoft and Google. Joel holds a First Class Honours degree in Journalism from Cardiff University.

Technical Review
Laura Iannini
Laura Iannini Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.