If you’re running ads online, click fraud is something you need to be aware of. Beacon is software that helps protect advertisers from click fraud. In this review, we’ll take a look at what Beacon does and how it can help your business.
Why Do You Need Click Fraud Protection?
Click fraud is a deliberate practice of fraud connected to PPC ads. It occurs s when a person or a bot purposefully clicks on your ads to use up all of your company’s advertising budget. The goal is to repeatedly click on your ads to generate erroneous costs for the business without any desire to make a purchase.
Click Fraud damages your campaign by doing the following:
Creates unnecessary charges
The most damaging and obvious consequence of click fraud is the inflated costs your business must bear as a result of fake clicks on your ads. It might even end up using up all of your campaign budgets.
Obscures Business Insights
Click fraud will cost your business money in other ways besides just draining the current budget with unnecessary charges. Additionally, it provides wrong data that can lead to decisions based on misinformation. This inaccurate data frequently affects campaign metrics negatively by steering your future strategy in the wrong direction.
Drains Budget for Future Digital Ad Spend
It goes without saying that click fraud will cause you to exhaust your advertising budget. And, it will provide you with false information and persuade you to alter your marketing plan. This distorted data will therefore waste money that could have been spent in the future.
Can Lead to Exceeding Daily Ad Cap?
Advertisers frequently set a daily cap on their ad clicks. Campaigns will quickly reach their limit if click fraud is active, without even helping your company in any way.
What’s even worse is that if you hit your limit, your competition’s ads will start to appear in your place. This will undoubtedly leave a long-lasting effect on your business’s bottom line.
Beacon Click Fraud Protection Overview
Beacon is a software that offers Click Fraud Protection on Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and Bing. The tool gives marketers the ability to precisely measure campaign results and obtain a more efficient campaign spend.
About The Company
The company’s previous role as a digital marketing agency inspired them to create the Beacon platform when it realized that ad fraud and a lack of transparency in data analytics was an escalating problem in the industry.
When it became clear that ad fraud was becoming more complex, Nigel Bridges, Mike Townend, and Stewart Boutcher founded Beacon as a means to develop a solution that combines the benefits of accurate marketing campaign data with ad fraud prevention.
An Award Winning Company
Beacon is a winner of the 2021 Prolific North ‘Best Martech Innovation’ and Tech Nation Rising Stars Award for Cyber Security
In 2022, they were officially recognized by the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry as an ‘Export Champion.’ Export Champions are successful, seasoned exporters who donate their time to encourage others to expand their businesses internationally.
How Beacon Protects Your Ad Campaigns?
With Beacon Click Fraud Protection, bots are automatically stopped from viewing and clicking on your ads, which allows you to block invalid traffic, giving you significantly more genuine clicks and impressions for the same ad spend, which ultimately increases the ROAS of your paid campaigns
Key Features
Detection against all channels
Using its sophisticated AI technology, Beacon distinguishes between human and non-human visitors and provides channel and campaign-level reports on this information. Beacon provides paid media and social advertisers with accurate data to enable better-quality decision-making by providing transparency on bot clicks and actual human visitors.
Automated Click Fraud Protection
Beacon detects bots and adds them to their bot protection database using digital journey tracking and device fingerprinting.
This database is used to prevent bot impressions (for CPM) and clicks (for CPC) on paid campaigns. The bot database is regularly updated, and custom bot exclusion lists are used to minimize click fraud over time.
Accurate Reporting
Beacon displays campaign results for human visitors and engaged visitors. Invalid traffic is eliminated from these reports, allowing you to calculate Cost Per Human Visitor (CPV) and Cost Per Lead (CPL) to get a true picture of how your client campaigns are performing. Using Beacon’s automated reporting and data exporting tools to analyze marketing results will improve paid campaign performance
Pricing
Beacon does not publish its pricing which is a common practice for SaaS companies. To get more information and a tailored price, you would need to complete a form on their website, and book a free call with one of their experts.
Pros and Cons
The Good Stuff
- Multi-channel protection
- Easy to use
- Hassle-free implementation
- Generates lead magnets in different formats
- Excellent customer service
The Bad Stuff
- Limited design templates
- Needs to improve customization for reports
- Some users have found the pricing to be on the steep side
Alternatives
Here’s a short list of leading click fraud protection software that can be a good option in case Beacon doesn’t turn out as a good fit.
Click Guardian
Click Guardian protects your Google Ads from click fraud by guarding against human, competitor, and automated clicks. Fraudulent activities are automatically stopped.
The tool can help you keep track of each click that occurs on your advertisements, detect bots, and learn more about how users interact with them.
To differentiate between genuine potential customers and fraudsters, Click Guardian uses advanced technology. It conceals the advertisement from the click fraudster once it has been identified.
PPC Protect
PPC Protect collects information on invalid traffic and click fraud and uses this knowledge to add a layer of security across all channels. On this tool, you can set traffic filters to select the types of traffic to omit from advertising campaigns.
The service can also be tailored to fit any specific industry or niche. Additionally, you can use it to safeguard multiple domains and grant different users access to them.
Fraud Blocker
Fraud Blocker seamlessly catches fraudulent clicks and blocks them in real-time once it’s connected to your website and Google Ad account.
In addition to analyzing your ad traffic, its algorithm assigns each user a score based on variables like device fingerprint, click frequency, IP address, VPN, invalid clicks, geolocation, and blacklist.
Conclusion
What makes Beacon stand out from other click fraud protection platforms is that it covers more than just Google search ads. It offers ad protection for Facebook, Instagram, and Bing as well. The rest of the platforms in the space are just now getting into multi-channel protection. So if you’re running paid ads and social ads, Beacon is one of the few solutions that can give you what you need. All in all, it delivers on what it promises. It’s a solid choice for safeguarding your business.
FAQs
What is Ad Fraud?
Ad Fraud is defined as any attempt to defraud digital advertising networks for monetary gain. Bots and click farms are frequently used by scammers and criminal gangs to commit Ad Fraud, but they are not the only methods.
Bot-assisted ad fraud, also known as click fraud, is common in the following types of digital advertising:
- PPC (ads on Google, Bing) (ads on Google, Bing)
- Posts promoted on social media
- Advertising through programmatic means
- Other forms of paid media, such as display banner ads
- Influencer advertising
What types of Google Campaign Ads does Beacon protect?
- Google search campaigns (including campaigns created in Search Ads 360)
- Google partner site search campaigns
- Display campaigns (including remarketing, app placements & affinity targeting)
- Shopping campaigns
What channels does Beacon’s bot-blocking program cover?
Beacon’s Bot Blocking program is only available for Meta (Facebook) and Google Ads PPC campaigns (for now). They’ll provide an IP Blacklist of the most prolific bots we are aware of for Google ads They’ll provide a mechanism for creating an ever-growing suppression list for you to exclude from seeing your ads on Facebook. The implementation of these to work with your ads is dependent on the ad network you are using.
