Overture Audit

Using IP addresses of your competitors

[Trey03]

I would like to obtain the ip addresses from my competitors and try to approach overture about a refund. Has anyone had any success in doing something like this. I was thinking about emailing my competitors using a phony email address and try to phish for a reply. I remeber some email services put the IP address of the sender on the email. Does anyone how to setup yahoo or hotmail to do this?

Thanks

Trey

[bostonseo]

Believe me, you're going to need a more strategic approach than that...trust me. I do not have any recommendations for you, just that what you are talking about isn't going to cut it.

[luckychucky]

I am speaking theoretically only, because believe me, I've never done it and I never will, on strongly held principle -- but IF I were to attempt creating a bunch of false clicks on my competitors' ads, I'd have a ton of my friends clicking 1x-only per day from each of their own browsers. I would not hit those ads repeatedly from my own site's server. That would just be plain dumb. Assuming your competitors have even a modest amount of grey matter, I'd assume they'd realize the same.

[Trey03]

I've thought about another way in getting my competitors ip address. I'll host an image from a site and send out an email with the image imbedded. As soon as they open the email, I have their ip address. Simple.

Now confronting Yahoo....
Can I just ask them to filter the bogus clicks from these ip addresses? Adding the ability to do this would greatly enhance their service. Should I confront them on one paticular competitor that is misbehaving and try to get the other competitors blocked as well? Any feedback, thoughts, ideas, strategies on how this could work?

Thanks

Trey

[werty]

Unless they are generating serious traffic I would doubt you will get a refund.

If you suspect they are draining your account another option would be to scare them into stopping...serve a page saying, their IP has been associated with fraudulent clicks, and that legal action has been taken. Only serve that page to the IP's that you want.

[Trey03]

I spent $750 last month on overture advertising. Is that enough to get help from them?

Thanks in advance

Trey