How Serious is Google on Click Fraud?

[SlyOldDog]

Thankfully I don't think we've been the target of any serious competitor clicking our ads for hours on end, although we know of at least one person who does it to us routinely.

I'm just wondering why Google doesn't take the simplest steps to prevent the fraud? They are obvious and would allay many fears.

1) We need to see the IP of everyone who clicks our Ad in the control panel - or at a minimum any IP that shows up more than once.

2) We need the ability to block our ad from being shown to that IP.

What is so difficult about that? I'd love to hear AdwordsAdvisor's opinion on the matter.

[tlehne]

I can only agree. We saw several thousand visits from one IP address, so we blocked it from viewing our site. But we would also like to block that IP address from viewing our ads.

Also we noticed that displaying ads on content sites created a high costs, but no revenue at all. We have excluded content sites from our ad campaign now. Costs are down, revenue is the same as before.

[skibum]

Reporting on our end for one campaign shows 12400 referrals from AdWords and 5300 unique IPs out of that 12400 referrals. The bill during that time period was for 6700 clicks which seems pretty reasonable. The ratios in most campaigns are fairly similar.

[richmondsteve]

12400 referrals
5300 unique IPs
6700 clicks

skibum, if I understand you right, you're saying this is typical for you. It looks like that comes to 5,700 clicks that you weren't billed for. In other words you weren't billed for 46% of your clicks and your ratio of billed clicks to total clicks was 1.18. Are others seeing similar results?

[IamWebmaster]

if i have a enemy-friend, and if he click on my ads 50 times on a Static ip? then.............

:@ tell me......

[richmondsteve]

IamWebmaster, I understand how it can happen. I'm just curious if others are seeing similar ratios of clicks charged for to referrals generated. On campaigns I'm associated with I haven't seen such a high percentage of unbilled clicks. Maybe less enemies?

[skibum]

It varies by site, but the number of billed clicks is usually higher than unique IPs but lower than clicks recorded. Presumably Google is doing a good job of filtering. As the percentage of unique IPs more closely matches the total clicks, the bill gets higher.

[SlyOldDog]

>>Presumably Google is doing a good job of filtering.

I am sure they are, but I would prefer to do it myself. Just give me IP blocking or filtering in the control panel where I can see it.

It's all smoke and mirrors now. Transparrency will bring more revenue to Google because it will offer the advertiser the security to know he has control.

I can't see any good arguments against this unless it's simply technically impractical.

[nakulgoyal]

I agree with SlyOldDog. The advertiser should have some control of not being defrauded.

[Shawn607]

Do you think that they are maybe just charging you for clicks that are either unique visitors or haven't been to your site within 24 hours and google would think that they are unique when in fact, they aren't. This is just a guess and I have no backing on this claim but if you go to bravenet.com you can get a counter for your site that will give you all your information about any click recorded on your site in case you don't have a system on your server to do this for you already. Please let me know more about this if anyone truly knows the algorithm that google uses for the PPC system.

[ogletree]

We get people from time to time that click on our ads that I knwo are competiters. I got OV to give me back $500 one time. I have been looking at my stats from my ROI tool and it tells me all PPC clicks. That stat is always higher than what OV or AW shows. I don't get charged for them. I had one day where I had 8 clicks on a $42 word and a $26 word but Overture said I had no clicks that day. All 8 clicks were from the same IP within a few minutes of each other and each one was from a different OV partner site. A few months back I had the same thing the guy was doing it every day for a month.

[airpal]

Ok, I think the real attention grabber here is ogletree's $42 and $26 keywords! Wow, I can't seem to find anything on Overture as high as even $26!

[fidibidabah]

A $42 word? Are you serious? That's unbelievable. I can't imagine any sort of keyword that would yield positive results on that sort of money. Even if you're selling items which are thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands, how many people would buy? That's a huge overhead. Heh, I guess if it works. If you can afford to do that, I wish I was in your shoes! *goes back to tweaking his $0.05 ads*

[bluedevil]

Mesothelioma is $60. I can see why law firms would pay much to find the right client and make millions in profit when suing large corporations.

Conference calls is $25. That I can't understand how someone can get in return.

[epptom]

"give me IP blocking or filtering in the control panel where I can see it."

Considering so many people are behind a proxy server, use AOL, Juno or NetZero (all ISP's that cache pages), IP tracking isn't really an accurate way to track :( Maybe Google is worried about the landslide of email they would be bound to receive from advertisers mis-reading data that doesn't make much sense to begin with.

I agree with you though - the more reporting the better. ;-)

[Shak]

having been involved in some very high value keywords, i can assure you that there are returns to be had.

Just because someone knows how to manage adwords, doesnt mean they know how to run a business.

separate the men from the boys.

ROI baby

Shak