experiencing fraud clicks!

[adsforcash]

ok, I just posted a question about this today and BAM! A surge of over 4000 clicks on ALL my campaigns! (sorry for yelling)

Who, What and Why?!

My only protection is my budget is set for all my campaigns. Someone pleeeease tell me that having a budget will protect me.

For now I've paused all my campaigns. Any advice would greatly appreciated.

This is sooo not cool!

[Jenstar]

Click on the contact us link in your Adwords account and let them know what you are seeing (including any related stats such as IP addresses, etc) so they can investigate the clicks.

[adsforcash]

I'm not sure how to get their IP address as I'm only placing ads for affiliates directly to their site.

The funny thing is I checked my main affiliate site (thinking that maybe it was just my day and that I had made a killing) and the number of clicks did not reflect the activity in my google campaign stats. Go figure.

Are there people (our competitors) that actually go through the effort to do this sort of stuff?

I am sooo p'd off right now. Another thing, as long as I have paused my campaigns I'm safe, right?

[theskunk]

If you run any PPC ads - YOU NEED TO ENSURE - that you can track your clicks independantly - so you know when somebody isn't playing fair.

look at your stats
make sure you have unique urls for each ad

[nevetS]

We experience a fair amount of fraud clicks. We use phpLive and it shows ip's and other info when they hit our site. Usually they come in in a brief flood and then disappear for a while. They come into our site for less than 5 seconds.

Our daily budget is low, so it hasn't so much of a problem that I've gone through the trouble of tracking down the sites that are causing the problem. I was a little under the impression that this goes with the territory on adsense.

We haven't stopped adsense because we get exposure on some really good websites. It'd be nice to track these guys down and disable 'em. One of these days...

[adsforcash]

Thanks nevetS...So I am right when I say I'm protected by my set budget?

[nevetS]

Protected in the sense that at you should never go very far over your daily budget. I regularly go 2-3 dollars over. My ROI is huge, though. 90 percent of our business comes from adwords. When we started in October, I was the only company who did it. Now I have four competitors including a national franchise competing. It's more expensive now, but since we have the best prices, best service, and we answer the phone round the clock, we're still in good shape. Now if I can only get a good SERP.

[adsforcash]

Is there software out there that can assist me with monitoring my click through rate and possibly make note of IP addresses?

Again, all I do is adwords for affiliates and do not have a website - would getting the IP address from my clicks be feasible in my situation?

[Michael Anthony]

An easy way to do it is simply put up a one page doorway site that you can then obtain stats for. Simply add the merchant's logo (if they'll alow it) and a "click here to enter our site" hyperlink with your aff code.

That way you can get your logs and identify the offending IP.

[eWhisper]

Odds are that type of page will not be approved by G as the landing page has nothing todo with the search term.

You could make a one page site including all the info about the product, and then a click to buy which would take you to the merchant site - that way you could collect stats.

[Michael Anthony]

I have a page just like that and G has approved it.

[adsforcash]

I've been meaning to put together a site with multiple links (can't decide on theme...business ops....real estate) but doing one page should be a little easier.

Any suggestions on hosting? cheap to free would be ideal : )

[jomaxx]

The best would be to have your own landing page but then use a .htaccess file to do a redirect to the merchant site. That way it's in your log file but invisible to the user. With a "click here" page there will always be maybe 10% or 20% of people who back out rather than continue on to the final destination.

You can also use a META tag or Javascript on the "click here" page to forward surfers to the merchant site immediately, but this makes it impossible for them to use their back arrows to return to Google. Users hate being trapped like this and it may also be frowned upon by Google.

[eWhisper]

but this makes it impossible for them to use their back arrows to return to Google

This is against G's TOS for AdWords - so it would be disapproved.

[adsforcash]

interesting....jomax, if it's not too complicated, would you be able to tell me how to set that up (redirect to merchants site..invisible to user)?

[jomaxx]

If you have Linux hosting you can just put a .htaccess file in the same directory as the landing page (actually the landing page doesn't even have to exist). The syntax is something like:
redirectpermanent /landingpage.html [affiliate.com...]

You can have multiple redirects corresponding to multiple affiliate links if you wish. Each clickthrough will then show up in your server log as a status 301 redirect.

I don't know if Windows web servers support .htaccess files or what. You could also use an extremely simple redirect script written in Perl or PHP. I'm sure you can find examples by searching Google for something like "Perl redirect script".

[adsforcash]

thanks jomaxx! I'll definitely look into this.

I just checked the stats for that day and it looks like Google took care of it. I don't know how they determined which clicks were fraudulent, but it's all good to me.

This whole thing has got me in that mode of checking my campaigns every chance I get - is this not a good thing?