Adwords Click Fraud?

[Omicrontau]

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Over the last two days one of my PPC campaigns on Adwords has attracted 100+ clicks. However, my network stats show only 3 unique visitors. I wouldn't consider my niche uncompetitive but it certainly isn't saturated. Is it possible that the competition is clicking my ads to push me out or am I just being paranoid?

Has anyone else experienced this and if so what did they do to prevent it?

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Find Discount Holidays

[tbp]

Its unlikely that your competitors are clicking ad's. Whilst its possible, you have to go to a fair bit of effort, as each click on an ad from a single ip isn't counted over and over. So you'd have to keep logging off the net, and then logging back in, clicking again and repeat. They could also get stopped by the other google preventative measures such as cookies.

So they may click on your ad once or twice, but you can't just click on someones ad over and over again and use their whole budget.

[moredial]

Find out which sites are hosting the ads that are being clicked. You may find that your ad found its way onto one of the sites where people are paid to click - often clicks by scripts that change IP address for each click so hard to detect.

While you have the network showing so few uniques, getting in a refund claim for all the rest could be useful.

[Omicrontau]

That's an interesting theory but I'm not advertising on the content network so am confident click sites are not the problem.

Anyway, how would I go about claiming a refund from the network? I noticed today that the interactive ad I'm using wasn't working properly. Unique visitors aside, I'm paying for traffic and people who actually make it to the site are not going to be impressed.

On a final note, would anyone mind having a look at my landing page and letting me know what they think? Click Here.

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Find Discount Holidays

[moredial]

I think the flash game is too much fun to play.

Most people gamble because it is fun and the stake is just the payment for fun. By giving a game which offers that fun element before they have parted with their cash, aren't you rather defeating the object of the exercise?

Now, I am not a motivated gambler who has just clicked on your link, so my response may not be typical. But, my gut feel is that the flash game takes attention away from the click at the top of the page, which I assume is the one you want them to click on.

[the-booker]

I have in the past used AdWords and found that if you write to them with your concerns they do listen as "you are paying their wages" so to speak

The Booker

[AttractionTix]

Good luck getting any kind of refund out of Google. We sent a comprehensive report to Google showing large amounts of fraud from our webserver logs. This was backed up by one of the larger PPC agencies.

Google sent me a "form email" back which just basically said - we have such good fraud detection algorithms that we are sure you havent had any fraud. They held onto my spreadsheets for a few weeks but it was clear they didnt do anything with them.

Yahoo on the other hand were very receptive and credited my account accordingly.

Google are now too big for their boots im afraid, hopefully something innovative with come along and competition will increase - forcing them to correct their behaviour. They know we cant just "turn them off" because we would then lose the revenue generated by visitors from Google. I am not an agency and I manage all our PPC internally, our budget approaches half a million £UK per year, and i believe that I am just not considered big enough in the google scale of things for them to take my emails seriously.

ho hum!

[moredial]

My mind always boggles at the amounts some people spend on PPC. I know I am biased because I earn an income from SEO. For the amount AttractionTix mentions, you can get a lot of SEO. For less than 10% you could have quite a few pages bringing in targeted traffic over 1000s of search phrases.

Don't get me wrong, there is room for PPC in any marketing campaign same as there are many other advertising streams available.

The big advantage of SEO is that it is a one-off cost that will continue to deliver traffic for years - until the next site re-write is done by someone without a clue about SEO and you have to start the process all over again.

[AttractionTix]

Dont put all your eggs in one basket

Our site is well optimised by a member of my team. We spend a great deal of time ensuring our sites use the latest techniques and ideas when it comes to SEO. The visitor profile from PPC and SEO is different so there is a place to have both on your site, and indeed if Google changes the way they index you could lose your living overnight!

)

[grobinso]

Hi , i have had the same experience as yourself Omicrontau i'm afraid.

Tried to work just with SEO but one minute you're up then you're down so gave in and tried Adwords about 3 months ago. Got hit straight away with fraudulent clicks and by carefully studying your logs you can tell straight away which are fraudulent and which are most likely genuine visitors. It's amazing how the same 'referrers' keep coming up, universities, local councils,and biggest pain in the butt of all IMAO is AOL.

If you find you're getting hit time and time again from the same i.p adddresses then add these to your exclusion list in Adwords, it doesnt work every time but it does help.

You can block out a max of 20 I.P's per campaign, not a lot i know so what i do is use a script to monitor my site stats, when a new hit is made it records the last 20 I.P addresses and uploads it to Google. It just wraps araund in a round robin fashion.

I work on the basis that as my landing pages are up and running and load reasonably fast theres no need for a genuine visitor to have to click my ads more than once or at the very most twice.

I have to say though that at one time i was getting paranoid about the click fraud and spent quite some time comparing my site logs against my Adwords records and they do seem to filter out quite a lot of the click fraud but i think you still have to factor in a percentage in your adwords budget to take account of click fraud.

I just started a new site this week in a completely different , although still very competitive sector and yes , there it is again...click fraud. I dont know if its competitors or Adsense clickers but my gut feeling is its competitors.

Good luck

Graham

[mktcm2]

This is highly possible that your new competitors do so and or one of you competitors ofr particular adwords has now withdrawn from the market. These can be preleminary reasons that your CPC has significantly gone up. Why not you get in touch with google adwords team and ask them to investigate this for you in detail and send you a report?

I am at the moment away on a research but when I get back in UK will look into my manuals to see what I can provide you to deal with this and hopefully get at least some money back from Google

Good Luck

[Omicrontau]

As a follow-up on my first post, I ran a campaign on Yahoo over Valentine's Day alongside Google. I did much better on Yahoo and spent less comparably speaking. I have yet to try Adcenter but my feeling at the moment is anything is better than Google. I simply don't trust it.

The only thing I don't get about Yahoo is how they broad match.

[grobinso]

Just found this link with info on Yahoo Keyword Match Options, maybe it will be of some help!

Overview: Match Types - Yahoo! Search Marketing Help


Graham