My research on fradulent clicks

How many clicks are real and where are they from

[skymanhonor]

So follwing some leads I discovered, as related to the InfoCommerce Report on India's secret army of ad clickers, that people are not clicking on their adsense ads to generate their own revenue (there was no googlesyndication.com referrals in my logs), but they are apparently clicking on the results in their own search sites powered by whatever paid results provider they choose.

For example - my referral logs are completely littered with sites such as (I am making these up but they may be real sites)

bestsearcharound.com
isearch4u.com
searchstarsite.com

and on and on all of which send between 1 and 15 visitors (most of them 1-5).

Are you guys seeing the same thing?

[sorry for the misspelling of the title, only caught the afterwards]

[Robino]

Pretty sick-huh!

I chalk it up to a cost of doing business this way.

[Lone_Eagle]

Google catches most of this and credits your account for the clicks.

I just tested a product called Who's Clicking Who and it shows the majority of clicks were from an AOL proxy. Apparently this is because AOL is a really big partner with Google.

There were also a lot of repeat clicks that looked like they were just visitors that went wild with the clicks (4 or 5 clicks). Some of the others clicked a couple of times and skip a day and click a few more times, this was the activity I was looking for and found only a few.

I only advertise in the US and I use negative keywords like "India" and "Russia" to hopefully keep them from seeing my ads. If you are advertising worldwide you may have a bigger problem. Then I would recommend getting software like Who's Clicking Who for a while to see exactly what is happening.

[Robino]

... I use negative keywords like "India" and "Russia" to hopefully keep them from seeing my ads...

Please explain this.

[Lone_Eagle]

I saw a report (I don't know how true it is) that there were companies in India and Russia setting up AdWords accounts and hiring housewives to sit there and click their Adwords links.

With that in mind I set up a huge list of negative keywords (Like -keyword) and made sure "India", "Russia" and a lot of other words like "free", were among them.

When you go into your campaign you will see a place to add negative keywords or you can add them like regular keywords with a "-" in front of the word. I found out that I've been spending way too much on searches that don't pertain to what I sell. Negative keywords are used mostly for the broad match.

I also turned off the content network in the section where you edit your campaign. After doing this I noticed a huge increase in my CTR and I think it got rid of some of the click fraud. The content network is something that I will have to do more testing on later.

[gmac17]

yeah, these armies of clickers are probably the ones who feed Kanoodle and the like. Every time I try another $100 with Kanoodle I get a ton of clicks from "galaxy search" and not a single nibble on the sales side of things.

[FromRocky]

I use negative keywords like "India" and "Russia" to hopefully keep them from seeing my ads

This might not work. The best way is to go into the "Edit Campaign setting" and select the countries you want your ads to be shown.