In Today’s Days and age Promoting your business online is essential. With the majority of consumers using online platforms to research products and services, a strong digital presence can increase brand awareness and drive traffic to a business’s website. Effective digital marketing campaigns can also help businesses reach their target audience, increase customer engagement, and ultimately drive sales. In short, digital marketing is a crucial tool for businesses to stay competitive and succeed in the modern marketplace. For this purpose businesses generally rely on Promotion Platforms like google Ads,Facebook ads etc.
Google Ads invalid clicks refund
However, invalid clicks on these platforms can cost businesses a lot of money and negatively impact their return on investment. There’s a good chance that your site may be a target of invalid clicks. While Google filters out invalid clicks pretty well, not all the invalid clicks are identified. In the case of Google Ads, businesses can request a refund for invalid clicks if they meet certain criteria, such as if the clicks are determined to be fraudulent or accidental. By being vigilant and proactive in monitoring and reporting invalid clicks, businesses can protect their advertising budget and ensure that their digital marketing efforts are effective.
This guide assumes that you are very well versed with the data stack for ads. This guide is meant for advanced users.
How it works?
- You’d need click reports – you can get those using Google Ads API. Here’s a documentation on the same.
- Our proprietary ICDT {invalid click detection tool). Currently, only our internal teams have access to it – but we will soon roll it out to public.
- For the sake of simplicity, we will load the weblog data to Metabase BI tool. So here, we will use Metabase to get clicks and IP address data. And, our ICDT tool to get anomaly data from the dataset. Generally, We prepare Weblog Reports on a Monthly Basis so each month, we will export the last month’s data. (Please note that Google only allows you to submit weblog data of last 60 days.)
Step 1 – Getting Clicks Data from Ads API
- Here’s the format of the table – for the click report.
Enter the filter for last 30 days (or any duration, upto 60 days).
Step 2 – Get the server logs – your webmaster can help you with it, every server log, will contain the url – including gclid, and the IP address.
You can use a simple regex, or run DBT to periodically create this table. The table for the server logs would look as follows.
Step-3 Use our tool to find anomalies.
Using our tool to identify the anomalies. At the time of writing, this Google ad tool is only available to our teams internally.
Step 4 – Join the table of anomalous clicks with the server log report. It should look as follows
Now, you can send this report to [email protected]. They’d generally send it to their team for investigation and credit you – if there are any invalid clicks that they didn’t filter out.
Here is a screenshot of one of the emails we got from Google Ads showing credit against invalid clicks for one of our ads account.