The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s what the Chicken Littles of the world would have you believe when they discuss how click fraud will doom the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Of course, some Chicken Littles have a vested interest in raising awareness of this supposedly rampant problem, considering many of them are the purveyors of products that help protect you from this threat.

I don’t mean to make light of click fraud. It certainly exists and if it is left unchecked it has the potential to cause serious harm to advertisers. But does anyone really expect the search engines to sit idly by waiting for hackers to kill their very substantial profit margins? The search engines take click fraud very seriously and have teams of folks whose job it is to try to protect advertisers from spending millions in a tide of click spam.

The search engines are not waiting for the problem to go away, and neither should you as an advertiser. You need to protect yourself from an issue that has the potential to kill the golden goose of PPC marketing and severely impact your return on investment.

First of all, if you are spending a decent amount of money on PPC (in excess of $1,000 per month), assume that you will become the victim of click fraud at some point. If you are marketing in a competitive channel, with a large number of keywords, top positions, high click value (over $1 per click) and a large marketing budget, you may have already seen traffic to your site rise in a suspect fashion on certain keywords.

As with any impending threat on the Web, protection comes down to vigilance. If you are a frequent Web user, you know you shouldn’t surf the Web unprotected. You need a firewall and an Internet security program to protect you from the shenanigans of those who propagate trojans and worms and phishing schemes. Seriously, if you have an unprotected computer, you better drop this magazine right now and go purchase the necessary software. You’ve got bigger problems than PPC fraud.

A good vigilance campaign deploys the following methods: take advantage of the tools the engines provide to you; purchase tools that allow you to see immediately if there are spikes in traffic and their source; and monitor your campaigns frequently.

Tools From the Search Engines

All of the major search engines monitor clicks across many different points of data. The majority of click fraud gets caught by the engines and never shows up in your reports, because they strip out those clicks before they bill you. Unfortunately, a small percentage can slip through mainly because the algorithms that perpetrate fraud are constantly adjusting. Just as it’s hard for the antivirus programs to keep up with the worms, etc., it’s also hard for the search engines to catch every piece of fraud when they are constantly under attack.

This is where you come in. Constantly review the reports that the engines provide to you, and if you see a spike in traffic start looking for reasons. Maybe it’s simply because one of your products was listed in a press release, but it could also be because one of your keywords is under attack.

The engines also provide billing reports. Pay attention to emails you get advising you of charges to your credit card. If you see an increased frequency of charges, it’s time to start investigating.

Tools You Can Purchase

Any of the basic tracking solutions allows you to see at a glance where spikes in your traffic are coming from. By viewing click data at the IP level, you can see if a large amount of traffic is coming from a specific IP address. That can be a good indicator that the traffic source may not be a good one.

Going to the search engines with these types of reports in hand will guarantee you an investigation and will likely result in a refund if the traffic is found to be bogus. Unfortunately, the types of reports you get from just viewing most Web logs are not detailed enough for search engines to conduct a thorough traffic investigation. You need the more detailed analysis that a tracking solution provides.

If you just want tracking on your pay-per-click campaigns, two good tools are Who’sClickingWho and Click Auditor from Keyword Max. These tools allow you to see at a glance what might be amiss with your PPC campaign.

Of course a more extensive tracking solution allows you to see traffic from every marketing campaign you are running and enables you to determine where you should be spending your money. Before buying one of these tools decide whether you just want to analyze PPC or if you would prefer to calculate ROI and conversion rates across all your campaigns. There are many great tracking solutions out there – both inexpensive and expensive – that let you do so. Many will give you a free trial version of the software.

Monitor Your Campaigns

Checking your campaigns frequently enables you to see patterns in your traffic and determine if something is wrong. If you are in the retail space you will definitely see seasonal and monthly changes in traffic, but service and B-to-B sites can also see varied traffic patterns.

If you have deployed a good tracking solution and are also using a bid management tool, you may only need to monitor your campaigns on a monthly basis. However, if you haven’t implemented those tools, at the very least you should take advantage of the free conversion analysis tools the engines provide, and watch your campaigns on a weekly basis.

Resign yourself to the fact that click fraud, just like phishing scams, isn’t going away. While the Net creates a global competitive marketplace for business and products, it also creates the same opportunity for thieves and scoundrels. But just as Chicken Little protected herself with the umbrella, you too can protect yourself and your business. Stay vigilant and monitor frequently, and you will be fine. Remember, PPC works and we all have a vested interest in ensuring it continues to do so.

MARY O’BRIEN is a partner at Telic Media. She was formerly senior director of sales at Yahoo! Search Marketing and is currently presenting their Advertiser Workshops around the country.