Click count to a downed/hanging site

How does adwords handle this?

[PPCBidder]

As many of you may be aware of, Amazon.com had some availability issues yesterday (11/6) for 4-5 hours of the day. For me, I first noticed this about an hour after the website was returned to full service in the afternoon.

Personally, I do have a fair amount of paid ads that point to amazon. When logging into my adwords account yesterday afternoon (right after the incident), I did notice some extremely high CTR for my amazon ads as a whole, some 60-65% higher than previous days. Over the remainder of the day (when amazon was fully up), my CTR average on those ads started to drop and just now finished the day at about 30% above a normal CTR.

It is hard to distinguish because Monday 11/6 was expected to be a huge traffic spike regardless, but this CTR pattern has me wondering if I ended up suffering a double whammy, where amazon was down plus I possibly ended up paying double or triple for some of these clicks during the downtime? If a link is slow or the site is down, a user is certainly more likely to click multiple times, which would also explain the bump I saw in CTR. I don't exactly know how google handles situations like this, but from reading other threads, I get the impression that the fraud detector doesn't naturally kick in until 3-4+ clicks from any given user/IP.

Now I certainly don't expect a refund for the initial clicks, but if double or triple clicks were consistently charged that would be unfortunate and I would hope to get a refund for those. Is there a way to get an account 'audit' or something for yesterday? I remember getting an email about having my own account rep, (which I haven't contacted to date, hopefully i still have the mail) but do you guys think I would be wasting my time to pursue this? Also - do you think it is likely that I was charged for double or triple clicks by an array of users during that time? My overall spend for amazon 11/6 would indicate that.

Thanks for input.

[Shak]

I would defo recommend contacting your account rep, or failing that, send an email to support outlining your circumstance and maybe pointing em to this thread aswell.

good luck

you dont ask, you dont get :)

Shak

[PPCBidder]

After analyzing more of my ad groups it appears to not be consistent at all across them - e.g. many are in line with expected CTR on a large sample size, some are even slightly lower. I have to chalk up the CTR thing on the main group that seemed out of line to seasonality, it does make sense that yesterday would be a big day for those terms (and elevated during the day - at work surfers). Just too bad amazon took a crap for a while :(

Shak - feel free to delete this thread I don't want to falsely alert other people. thx

[PPCBidder]

Well guess what, I decided back on that day to just eat the losses since I couldn't conclusively determine anything, but today I find an adjustment for a couple hundred bucks in my account. Naturally I have to assume this is what it was for.

Other people with some amazon PPC campaigns, do you see a credit applied to you in adwords invoices for Dec 19?

Anyway, thanks google for that. (and to the person(s) who probably worked to get a refund, benefiting us all - me lazy & bad ;) )

[PPCBidder]

Shak's moral:

you dont ask, you dont get

But when in company you can sometimes get away with being a lazy bum? Yea, I think there is a golden book like that. ;)