Click Fraud in Affiliate Link AdWords?

How can you tell if it is fraud with Affiliate URLs?

[AW_Learner]

I have a campaign I did in Adwords for an Affiliate site. And for the last week the clicks on all keywords have been just a few. One particular keyword got only 1 or less clicks a day with like a 0.1% CTR. Then all of a sudden overnight yesterday this keyword jumped to almost 500 Clicks with a CTR of almost 15% or so. Yesterday and today it got the exact same amount of clicks. Exactly 467 Clicks yesterday and 467 Clicks today. The conversion of these clicks has been terrible and almost nonexistent. With only a couple conversions (with super small commission). With the action being FREE to the users for the commission I would expect a much higher conversion if this was all legitimate traffic.

I just don't understand how one keyword can go from 1 click a day with a terrible CTR to almost 500 a day Overnight with 15% CTR? Especially considering that there are over 100 keywords in this campaign and this one keyword is the ONLY one with any clicks on these days. How can it get 467 Clicks and all the other keywords get zero clicks? Is that really legitimately possible?

I never changed my CPC or Anything else like the Ads in this time that would of effected that. It was always set at 5 Cents per Click.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is it something to be concerned about or something that legitimately just happens sometimes to keywords?

How can I find out if they were fraud clicks? How can I protect myself in the future?

It's one thing to send people to your own site so you can view the server logs and the IPs and times of clicks etc. But when sending to an Affiliate Merchant's site directly how do you tell?

Thanks!

[MarkHutch]

You need to write to Google about this. However, they may already be on this when you write. They look for problems like this one, everyday.

[AW_Learner]

Thanks. I already wrote to Google about this. I'm just wandering if there is some way I can do my own verification of this. Now or in the future. After reading other posts on here I wonder how long it will take to hear back from them and if I can really trust there response once I do. Being that there customer service reps are not really technically minded and there responses vary so much from rep to rep.

I really wish they would just charge only on "unique" click throughs. At least in the same day time period. Just like those Affiliate programs that pay you per click you get on there banners. They only pay you for each "unique" click through. Yet Google will take any clicks. Even from the same person over and over all day...

[MarkHutch]

I think they take all clicks because the ads are different from page to page on a site. Are you talking about uniques per domain or per page or both?

[roitracker]

Click fraud is a growing problem (for all PPC's, not just AdWords). If you don't have access to log files, the only way to monitor it yourself is to use tracking software that logs every click/IP before redirecting to the destination page.

[AW_Learner]

I'm talking about Uniques per IP. They can even do it where they only count a click on an ad once per unique IP within 1 hour. That way someone would have to come back each hour to click on your ad again for it to be charged again. Even for valid clicks, they shouldn't charge multiple times for the same visitor just because the clicked there back button to view other ads then clicked on yours again and again to compare the sites. Especially within the same search query. Maybe they are worried about some ISP's giving users the same IP Address. But they could also track by IP + Search Query and only charge once per Search done per IP.

Of course Google is greedy. That's why they keep so many secrets.

They wrote me back and of course just gave the standard generic cut and paste response with ZERO intention on looking into it or taking it seriously. Just the usual run around. I seriously don't believe they catch all invalids just through there "brilliant" auto-detection which they never reveal how that works...

If they did there would not still be so many cases of it happening with people being able to verify it on there own web logs and such...

[edited by: Shak at 9:27 pm (utc) on May 26, 2004]
[edit reason] NO email quotes as per TOS [/edit]

[hobbnet]

Do the clicks convert?

This is the first thing to check. If they convert, you should be beaming! :)

I do a lot of pay per click search engine marketing. Sometimes these engines can get a new distribution partner that specialize in a certain area which can really boost traffic for select keyword terms.

For example, I have a findwhat campaign that was doing small volumes for a long long time...Now this campaign is a huge spender and 90% of the traffic goes to two terms and I am loving it. The traffic is converting very well.

[AW_Learner]

No the traffic does not convert! And the action for the conversion is 100% Free to the users! Out of 1000 visitors only a couple completed the free action. Out of $50 spent on clicks at 5 Cents a pop I got back $4 in Commissions.

If they had converted that would of proved that they were valid clicks for the most part. But them having such a low to nonexistent conversion is part of lead to further suspicion regarding it. That and the drastic trend. If Google had gotten a new partner that caused the traffic then it would be spread out through some of the other similar and high profile keywords I had in the campaign. But only one keyword got 100% of the clicks. All others got a total of ZERO clicks. Even though they all had plenty of impressions. Some are very close variations of the keyword that got all the clicks....

Anyways, Google says they will investigate it. I'll see if my suspicion was correct.