95 of our Adwords is on the Content network. We know for a fact that there is major click fraud going on. In December we implemented a new tracking system and discovered 10% of the clicks were fraudulent....
We sent this report to Google and they responded with the same generic... "We couldn't find fraudulent clicks.. bla bla bla... we use special software to detect this that we can't tell you about bla bla bla....... you are not getting any money back...."
I sent a "Gripe" email to my rep saying. These are obvious invalid clicks... and again I got another, "No there weren't you don't get your money back email"
Then I look at our account today and see two "Service Adjustments" totally guess what.... yep..... 10%
All I can say is click fraud is real and It pains me to think of the tens of thousands of dollars we have lost over the last three years.
I'm not trying to slam my reps. They have all been very nice but what can I say...?
heyday
Or, as was mentioned, write it off as CODB.
Freq---
how does your new tracking system recognize the fraudulent clicks? IP? referer? date:time? cookie? A combination?
/Tobias
I'm not trying to slam my reps. They have all been very nice but what can I say...?
There may be a simple explanation: Clicks aren't audited in real time, so it was too early for the rep to see the audited data.
(I can verify that clicks aren't audited in real time for publishers. I've been hit by clickbots a couple of times, and the adjustments to reported revenue were made at the end of the month, not when the invalid clicks occurred.)
In retrospect, I'm actually glad I had to go through this process. After doing the manual research & data gathering it took to submit all the invalid click data to google, it made me realize that contextually 'relevant' content network ads don't help me. A conversion for me doesn't result in an online transaction - rather it's (hopefully) just the beginning of a 3+ month sales cycle.
Armed with this new intelligence, I've since made some dramatic adjustments to my adwords campaigns and have seen no downside thus far.
The credit was still nice to see, though!
On the 20th of Dec I had a different type op fraud, it seemed someone was just loading the pages without clicking on them which resulted to my CTR for that keywords going from 14% to 0,4% CTR .. I waited 3-4 days to see if it maybe was a glitch and then made a report about it to google.
My impressions went up
day 1 10x normal
day 2 20x normal
day 3 50x normal
day 4 80x normal
I decided to pause the entire campaign and called google about it. First they have send this to their tech department to see if anything suspicious was goingon. They concluded having no reason why the impressions went up so extreme and has send it to the US spam/fraud team to investigate.
After a few days I got response that it indeed was a issue with impressions spam (never they mail me with this, only call) and they have garantueed me that my CPC and my average rank will remain the same and they have adapted something from their backend about this.
So now I still have extreme impressions, but my position is still 1.1 and my CPC is the same. It's ok, but it still looks retard to me having such bad CTR.
Google is a public company and for a company like google to admit anything is wrong with their system or is fraud sensitive will mean it's system is incompetent. No one wants to do business with an incompetent company and It could kill the prices of google stocks. So NEVER they will admit anything, but they will fix it with you for sure.
google has been treating me good so far.
