Click fraud is one of the most common and widespread fraud types in the world of digital advertising. During the last five years, click fraud was one of the top three most talked about types of digital crimes, as well as one of the largest wastes of spending to ad budgets.

What makes click fraud so prevalent? The answer is simple — click-based campaigns in advertising are widely used and marketers pay high prices. Because of this, fraudsters have mastered numerous techniques to exploit ad campaigns and heist the budgets.

This year alone, traffic sources all over the world have seen massive growth due to anti-virus measures and lockdowns in the majority of countries. More people went online and spent almost all day in front of their screens. It goes without saying that ad fraudsters made every effort to seize the opportunity to get their hands on this growing volume of traffic.

In the first three months of 2020, FraudScore has processed dozens of billions of clicks, and around 25% of them turned out to be fraudulent, with some campaigns seeing click fraud rate reaching up to 89%.

These numbers are horrifying, but they explicitly demonstrate the reality — fraudsters know their game and they know how to fraudulently appear as real users and execute real clicks.

There are various forms of click fraud techniques such as bot traffic, click flooding, cookie stuffing, click farms, ad stacking, etc… All of these are aimed at one cause — generating as many clicks as possible and getting the last click before the install. This means the users are real, but they either didn’t click your ad at all, or even worse, didn’t even see the ad.

FraudScore customers have been asking for a tool that will allow them to be proactive in fighting click fraud — a real-time solution that will stop fraudulent clicks from reaching the advertisers and help save time on negotiating with publishers. This tool has to work as a filter against fraudulent clicks, and assist in obtaining high-quality traffic for PPC/CPI/CPA campaigns. The FraudScore team has taken all of this into consideration, developed such a tool, and introduced it to the market at the beginning of 2020. The solution is called “SafeClick” and the name speaks for itself. SafeClick protects campaign reports from being undermined by click fraud, saving you time and money.

How does FraudScore’s “SafeClick” work?

SafeClick is a solution that uses FraudScore’s anti-fraud capacities and algorithms to detect fraudulent clicks in real time.

SafeClick checks if the click is fraudulent or genuine, and based on the click quality, sends it either to the Target URL or redirects it to the fallback URL. The fraudulent clicks get cleared from the traffic, and the legitimate ones are passed on. SafeClick performs on the frontline before fraudsters can undermine statistics and conversion rates.

The fallback URL can be set at the marketing platform side or can be customized at FraudScore’s system. The settings are easy to use and can be completed in a couple of steps.

SafeClick can also be used by marketers who want to analyse clicks outside of the popular marketing platforms, or with their own custom platform. With SafeClick URL Builder, FraudScore clients can build click URLs secured with fraud filters to customize according to their demands.

Additionally, SafeClick has a Monitoring mode in which all the clicks (both fraudulent and real) are directed to the Target URL — but all the bad clicks will be labeled as “fraud” and are available for further analysis and investigation in FraudScore’s reports. This option is especially useful for marketers to test drive new partners and traffic sources.

FraudScore reports are known to be comprehensive and highly user oriented. They enable marketers to drill down the traffic quality reports and build up reliable fraud cases. FraudScore provides evidence about both detected and blocked fraud, and supports its customers in negotiations:

FraudScore has also made it possible to activate the SafeClick option only for some particular offers. This allows marketers to set the click fraud filter according to their demands.

A proactive approach to click fraud is an insurance for your ad campaigns. As long as fraudsters keep on coming up with new malicious schemes and methods, there will be numerous threats to marketer’s businesses, trustworthy partnerships, reputations and long-term contracts.

Marketers are welcome to test SafeClick feature or other FraudScore antifraud solutions with a 30-day free trial. FraudScore’s platform is designed to detect ad fraud not only at the click level, but also on pre-bid, impressions, conversions and post-install levels. So no matter what type of campaigns you are running, FraudScore is the right tool to fraud-proof your ad budgets.