Impression Fraud

something G would benefit from battling?

[Murdoch]

Now, I can see why G would be slow to move on click fraud. After all, it makes them money, and if you can't monitor your own logs to the point where you can't recognize it, then it's your own fault (I don't actually believe that but it's what I've resigned myself to thinking) but what about impression fraud?

Over the last few days I've been noticing terms (or certain variations of said terms) with unusually high impression counts. Seeing as my terms are geocentric I've been noticing the same variation of a term along multiple regions with this unusual activity whereas this particular term never had such high numbers before. For the sake of simplicity I'll do a fake example:

Terms would be...

This Widget Texas
That Widget Texas
These Widgets Texas
Those Widgets Texas

Normally "This Widget Texas" would be the highest searched term. A run through Wordtracker would confirm this. Now "These Widgets Texas" has 8 times the impressions with the same number of clicks it would usually get. And it's the same situation with "These Widgets Florida" and "These Widgets California"...you get the idea. It reduces the CTR and drives up CPC.

Has anyone been affected the same way lately? I'm guessing it's pretty rampant in competitive markets.

[Evroccck]

it wouldnt make much sense for somone to do this b/c most likely they are bidding on the term as well and its going to reduce EVERYONEs CTR.

i guess it could happen, not sure if its too likely tho.

[inbound]

What about pausing a campaign then doing the attack. Once the attack is over the person switches their ads on again. Now that may be obvious but it could work.

I'd assume that someone would have to have an O.K. CTR and bid, then pause for a while (maybe a week) whilst the attack runs for maybe 4 days during their pause.

It's scary when you think how it effect people.

[BradleyT]

Sounds easily exploitable to me - however do page refreshes count towards total impressions?

[Evroccck]

my google rep said no... needs to be an individual search...

thats an intersting concept.