dsforeman - 2:33 am on Mar 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

I hardly think this is competitor click fraud. I rank highly for natural search and Adwords consistently on some campaigns and for those campaigns my traffic has mearly shifted from the PPC to Organic Hits. Of course this is good for me. My adwords bill is declining and my over all lead generation has remained the same. I am going to have to shift resources to the Natural Search side to maintain my position as I am sure the market will figure this out. The question is why is Google doing this. It is now clear that the Adwords don't go "up north" on weekends for many keywords. During the week they go back up. I think this must mean that Google is optimizing thier algorithms by the time of day and by the day of the week. Durring the week people are shopping and on the weekend they are mostly looking for info... this is just my theory. I think competitor click fraud is not a factor. It does happen, but not on a large scale. It's like credit card fraud -- maybe 2 to 3%