Studies show that about half of all Internet traffic is generated by “bots” and other automated systems, and unfortunately, a lot of these bots “click” on your various paid ads.

The ad networks like Google, Facebook and Microsoft say they try to prevent it, but they miss a lot. Besides, relying on them is like letting the fox guard the hen house…

It’s also very common for your competitors to drive your ad cost up (and conversion rate down) by repeatedly clicking on your ads. Or worse, hiring a “click farm” to do the dirty work for them.

In addition to bots and competitors, you may be surprised to learn that a lot of your prospects and even existing users or customers use Google search as “bookmarks.” Any time they want to return to your site they’ll search your brand name on Google and click the first thing that shows up at the top – which is usually your paid ad.

Again, the ad networks aren’t much help here. They use black-box algorithms, they don’t tell anyone how their systems handle this, and they will absolutely charge you for repeat clicks from the same user in a relatively short period of time in an unreasonable way that just wastes your money.

So to help you combat all of this, Campaigns offers something we call Click Shield.

Click Shield allows you to set up simple rules to define what type of paid click behavior is acceptable for your business, and what’s not e.g. Allow 2 clicks per week.

Anyone who violates these rules is added to a custom audience at your ad network, which is used to prevent these “abusers” from seeing your ads, so they can no longer click on them and waste your ad budget.

The end result is reduced ad costs with no change in conversions – money that goes straight back in your pocket.

From a technical standpoint, here’s how Click Shield works …

When you set up your Click Shield rules, each rule has an associated “Exclusion Page URL.”

This is the URL of a simple page you’ll need to create on your end, for the purpose of adding “abusers” to one or more ad network custom audiences you’ll set up for this purpose. 

When an incoming click violates any of your Click Shield rules, the click will be instantly redirected to your Exclusion Page URL – which automatically adds that user to your custom “exclusion” audiences.

You can use the same Exclusion Page URL for all of your rules and all your Campaigns Projects, you could have a unique Exclusion Page for each and every rule, or whatever makes the most sense for your business.

Your Exclusion Pages can also contain any content you want, or they could simply redirect back to your main landing page after a few seconds just to give your ad network pixels a chance to load …

The only requirement is that you add the necessary custom audience tracking codes from your ad networks. Other than that you can do whatever you want with your Exclusion Pages.

Step 1 – Set Up Your Exclusion Page

Most users will just need a single Exclusion Page per Campaigns Project. A good idea is to redirect the lead back to your main landing page after 2 or 3 seconds (which will give your ad network pixels time to load).

So using your favorite page builder, create your exclusion page and have the URL ready as we’ll be using that URL in the following steps.
 


Step 2 – Set Up Your Custom Audience

You’ll generally want to set up one new “exclusion” custom audience per Campaigns Project at each of the ad networks you advertise on. Then just tweak your existing ad targeting to exclude this new custom audience, and be sure to exclude this audience on any new ads that you set up.

If you’re already familiar with custom audiences, this shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

If you’re not already using ad network custom audiences to better target and optimize your ads, you really should be, so learning how to do this will be time well spent. The below articles and videos will help you get started with custom audience in popular ad networks.



Step 3 – Set Up Your Click Shield Rules

Select Click Shield from the Tools menu within your Campaigns dashboard.

 

Set up one or more rules e.g. Allow 1 click every 1 day, or Allow 3 clicks every 3 weeks.

Every business is different, so unfortunately we can’t tell you exactly what your rules should be. You’ll have to decide what makes the most sense for you based on your ad spend, profitability and risk tolerance.

Be sure to enter the correct URL for your Exclusion Page that you set up in Step 1 previously.

 

And that’s all there is to it. From this point on Click Shield is a “set and forget” type of thing, and it’ll just continue working for you in the background 24/7, 365 days a year to save you money.

We hope you enjoy this feature, and that it saves you a ton of money. If you have any suggestions on how we can make it even most useful please let us know!