I recently created a reasonable priced Google Adword campaign for my business ColoradoViews.com http://www.coloradoviews.com. Within a few days of launching this campaign I started to notice the strangest behavior. The second my campaign would show up in my browser it would be immediately clicked-off, and once my daily expense maximum was hit the campaign would turn off for the day. I watched this behavior day after day. I now have canceled this campaign and I am wondering if it is possible that other companies are paying groups of people to click-down the competing paid Adword? Has anyone else seen this behavior? If companies really are clicking-down the competition could this mean a pending doom for Adwords?

ColoradoMountainProperty@yahoo.com

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Passionate about the San Juan Mountains.

i'm spending 100$ on adwords daily for our business site, noticed the same a few weeks ago but never since. google mailed me a voucher, saying that abuse was noticed

There are many reasons this can happen. What is your daily expense? Is it a very competitive keyword? Are you being published in the content network?

On a highly competive keyword and low budget it does not take much to run through your budget. If you are also advertising in the content network it's possible that you could be 20 in google but 1 or 2 in one of many sites used in the content network. The sad thing about any type of PPC is that it's almost a guarantee that some competitors will want to see who is advertising against them and will generate a clicks. My guess would be is that if you want your ads to run on a regular basis plan to spend tons of money. It's common that some sites are spending several thousand a month on PPC on popular keywords.

You almost have to think of it as I can afford to throw away X amount of money a week, month, year and hope you get a good ROI on it. Not every campaign whether it's PPC, Magazine, Newspaper or Television is going to guarantee results.

imaginemn

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Sure, I even hired a service to track fraud. I noticed, based on the service that about 5-10% of all clicks were fraudulent threw Google. See my thread http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=28629 . No one has replied, so it appears that no one knows. I know the people from WhosClickingWho jump into this forum on occasion, and I am real surprised there has been no response.

IMO DON'T sign up with WhosClickingWho. Sounds nice, but when you ask...you don't get any response, backup or help with proving your case. At least I see sales from Google. BTW, my spend is >$100 per day on Google.

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kjohnson
www.discount-leather.net
Pat yourself on the back before they kick you in the a__

Did you report the abuse for google to investigate? Or google found it themselves and mail a voucher without your request?

thanks,
franky

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Kentyn, how did you discover this behavior? How do you know this was happening? I'd be interested to learn how to track this behavior in my own AdWords campaigns. Thanks! 8-)

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Willow Polson
www.willowsplace.com
Willow's Place Pagan Web Store

If you are concerned with Google ADword fraud then the first step is to remove your Google AD from their affiliate network, so your AD is only shown on the Google search engine. The affiliate network is made up of independent websites that Google pays each time a person clicks through a Google AD that is shown on their website. By elimenating that exposure, you limit your company from 99.99% of the population that could profit from sending fraudulent clicks through your AD.

The last 0.01% of fraud would come from your competitors, who would be clicking on your ADs to keep your ADs from showing up. If you feel this is happing you should alert Google right away. Google last reported that they are going after these criminals for the full sentence of up to 30 years, so ultimately those actions would put your competition out of business for a very long time.

I hope this helps.

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Tim Hentschel
Lexyl Travel Technologies, Inc.
310-562-8777
www.Lexyl.com

So has anyone seen where this has happened? I would think this would make the news somewhere.

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www.jwmart.com
Offering hip flasks, wall clocks & more!

That's why I don't use them! or any of the pay per clicks. They just ate up my budget and I didn't see any increase in sales. I've concentrated on SEO to get found in the SEs and my traffic/sales in increasing as "time goes by." There's no easy fix from my experience.

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PPC plans are rife with fraudulent click-throughs. As the search engines get paid for each of these clicks, there is little motivation for them to stop it.

Unless you have a time-sensitive item that has to be out in the search engines ASAP (like concert tickets), PPC is a loser.

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DrTandem's San Diego Web Page Design, drtandem.com

This is not the exact article I was referring to in my first thread, but it does talk about the fraud.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3387581

The article I was referring to may have been a report on Fox News,CNN, MSNBC? about two guys that Google caught after they had defrauded the system for over $100,000. The funny part about the story was that they only got caught because they told Google they would not stop the fraud unless Google paid them millions.

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Tim Hentschel
Lexyl Travel Technologies, Inc.
310-562-8777
www.Lexyl.com

I disagree about it being a loser -- I've gotten good clickthrough and conversion through Google AdWords and it more than pays for itself.

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Willow Polson
www.willowsplace.com
Willow's Place Pagan Web Store

I also disagree with the statement that PPC are only fraudulent. PPC makes the difference between "making a living and just barely living."

Lots of fraud yes, but there is no better way yet to get interested people to the site consistently. Say you rank #1 in the SERP's for 4 major keywords. That's great, but what about the other 150 words people are looking under? Business lost.

I don't advertise on the SERP's that I have good rank on, only on those I don't.

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kjohnson
www.discount-leather.net
Pat yourself on the back before they kick you in the a__

I am in a very costly PPC world and I can tell you first hand that alot of fraudulent clicks happen. I have to account for at least 25% of my budget to competitors click my ads down. In turn this increaes my click through rate and runs my ad up the list. I have also found that running my ads only on the content network returns more qualified leads.

Broadband Providers DSL Providers T1 Providers

That´s a good point. When competitors are stupid enough to click on your ads, not only do they help you by increasing your CTR, but at the same time they make your CPC go down AND their own CPC up.

Besides that, I am confident that Google catches most click fraud, but a percentage does get through of course, and those clicks help you get better CTR´s.

Unless you suspect that most of your clicks are fraudulent, I wouldn't worry too much about click fraud. Just maintain a dynamic campaign, manage it well, and Adwords will do you good.

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Otimização de Sites (SEO in Brazil)

Peter.

What makes you think that Google catches most of the CPC fraud?

Just wondering.

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kjohnson
www.discount-leather.net
Pat yourself on the back before they kick you in the a__

Well, if they didn't, Adwords would have died out a long time ago.

Besides, All adwords campaigns that I know of are resulting in more sales. Some even depend on it completely.

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Otimização de Sites (SEO in Brazil)

Well, I'm puzzled. Why would you be using Google Adwords anyway? As far as I can tell, you're just selling 109 acres of land in one location.

I assume that because every navigation link on your website (as well as most internal links) seems to go to the same exact property. And the links are titled Colorado Mountain Land, Colorado Horse Ranch, Pagosa Springs, Durango, Santa Fe, Wolf Creek Ski Area, San Juan Mountains.

If you were using those as keyword phrases in your Adwords campaign, it seems to me like you were setting yourself up to be clicked on by zillions of people - none of whom were thinking that the only thing you were selling was just one piece of land.

If this was indeed what you were doing, I'm not at all surprised that you were being clicked on rapidly, and it has nothing to do with something out-of-line on the part of clickers. It would be, in my not-even-close-to-being-humble opinion, simply a very poorly designed Adwords campaign.

Granted, I'm just basing a guess about your Adwords campaign on your website links, but...

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I used to use both Google and Overature and paid @ $24 - $100/day. Some of my fellow webmasters were paying 3 to 4 times that amount as well. The difference is they could see a good return from their clicks, I couldn't. I had the clicks for some of my products go to unindexed websites to assure they could only register clickthroughs for the independent CPC provider and put visitor meters on them to register visitors and their time on the websites. Both Google and Overature were registering clicks with average onsite times of 0.00 seconds and 0.05 seconds. Clearly this demonstrated click fraud as the clicks didn't allow the page to even partially load before leaving the website and noone clicks on a website and drops off that fast when they are a legitimate click customer.

After receiving emails advertising software that could be programmed to click your competitor's ads to deplete their advertising account or be used to click ads on your website, thus increasing your income from the ads shown on it, I realized what was happening to my advertising ad programs and stopped both programs immediately and have never restarted them. I found that my sales dropped only $200 - $300 per month when I did this but the gain was $400 to $1,000 per month in saved ad expense. I cannot stand a thief and I refuse to allow them to continue to pick my pocket in this manner and neither Google nor Overature bothered to tell me that there was fraudulent activity on my account, much less compensate me for it. Perhaps my two accounts weren't big enough for them to notice and the thieves were able to fly under the radar but until they can assure me they can and will stop fraudulent clicks I will never give them another dime.

Another trend I have noticed, and this could just be coincidence, is that the websites that I had ads for that were indexed by the searchengines were all top rated on the first or second page before I began the ad programs. Once I started I noticed them dropping down further and further. Now that I have been off the programs for about four months the websites are returning to top positions again. Coincidence? All I can say is that a lot more goes on in the background at the searchengines than they will ever admit to as you can "hide murder" with an "unknown and mystical" algorithm. I congratulate those who were compensated by Google, as for me, my pocket hurts too much when it keeps getting picked by those I can't catch and personally show them the errors of their ways, lol. Having top positions is the best way to fight CPC fraud as you don't need to pay for ads when your sites are at the top so that's where mine are either at or going to quickly. Monitor your costs and clicks closely and if they are paying off keep it up, if not, check into it deeper and you may find you either have an enemy/competitor or thieves picking your pocket and then you must decide an appropriate course of action. Good luck to all!

there was an article in May this year, telling us that in India people get paid for clicking om ads. This may be an answer.
Wim

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BillSpots

I have never used any CPC campaign and am quite happy with my rankings and my sales from my sites.

Good SEO, good content and ethical practices brought me this far so I think I would just keep doing what I am doing.

Besides, there are countries where people cannot afford $ 100-00 a day on an ad campaign - our money is 6 times your money so it is just a matter of affordability. In South Africa my clients can't afford that type of money either.

Having said that, I have agreements with them that states that when we make money from the sites, we plough it back into advertising but CPC raise too many questions and we cannot afford to loose that type of money.

So I would rather buy links in the right places than use CPC until they found a way of tracking and controlling fraud.

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perhaps I'm missing something? but surely if you have a decent site stats program, I use hitslink, you would be able to identify same IP clicks onto your site from google based on a consistent search term. At the very least you can see if there is fraud, that being the case you can identify the IP and pass to Google. The rest is up to Google and how serious they take it.

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