samwise - 11:47 pm on Apr 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

My experience has been that there is a lot of click fraud going on. I have a forum of which there are some very problematic people/machines that sign up anywhere from 3 to 30 times a day. All from different IPs and email addresses. I can tell it's from the same people/machine because they don't ever post anything. This happens all the time.

Apply that to clicking on ads

I've signed up with a click fraud program and found out a lot of things most of which are not good. From what I can see is they don't click on your ad 5 times or even 2 times in a row but rather just once a day, every day or two or three. They'll click on a few of your ads one day and then rotate clicking different ads. None of which even amount to anything. My raw logs say they don't even stay long enough for the page to load let alone read anything. I've had adword ads displayed on the third page (google search) and get clicked by the same IP addresses. This means they have to go look for my ads. This isn't "Organic" and hasn't amounted to very many sales. I think some clicks are from competitors and others from?

If the fraudsters can change their IP address this fast I don't see how anyone/computer can tell them apart from a real person who is interested in the ad content etc... Google and Overture have refuned some of my money but there is still click fraud.