Anyone besides me seeing this?
Also, were your "widgets" recently featured someplace? in the news, et? That might cause a spike in interest & search volume.
I'm showing KW's with increases of 10X, from 100 to 1000, or from 5 to over 220, for example. All while maintaining position.
I'm a little surprised that they give nothing more than a canned response, given they have some of the KW's in question, and they already have my long term averages, which would show them something is wrong, if they would bother to look.
I have my doubts about clicks at another company's PPC program but too early to pass judgment.
I received a canned response basically saying they filter for fraud, and that it will take several weeks for them to look into it, if I provide additional information.
If they filter, it's probably a known list of "bad robots" and abusive IP addresses. I called and explained that I had more impressions than clicks. The explanation was the page being pulled out of the cache. Then I told them the ratio, and got silence, and a "send us the proof". I sent in a complete logfile showing that this was impossible. All clicks were within 2 minutes of each other, disguised as a popular web browser. The problem is that such a version of the web browser never existed. It may well in 2010, but I question a system that cannot detect a CTR with 6 0's in it. I have graciously accepted the gift of top position, and am not going to push the issue, because in the long run, it was well worth the (forced) investment.
Have you checked to see if a competitor has dropped out of the listings?
I would go to the adwords login and compare your position accross two different time periods. If it has increased that may be the cause.
Their filtering is pretty good, at least as far as I've tested it with my own campaigns.
My tracking software shows about 4 clicks per minute from random IP's.
I've complained to Adwords Support but only got a standard response and a request for more information. I'm just about to send them full details including logs so lets see what happens.
If you are an Adwords advertiser, watch your campaigns closely for click fraud because it is obvious that someone is using a click bot that emulates normal clicking activity, and Adwords haven't been able to stop it so far.
If you check less than once a day, or go on holidays and dont get someone else to check, i think this is much more than sensible.
Based on what happened to me, if you get hit by the click bot then 95% of the clicks will be fraudulent. This means that 95% of whatever limit you set will be money down the drain IF your ad is targeted. Plan accordingly.
You will see from now on there will be a lot of complains about Adwords. We had almost none until Adsense.
Almost none? Read through the old threads powerstar. There have been quite a few complaints. Its inherent in the PPC model whether on OV or Adwords or whatever.
I'm just not sure what you base your prediction above on? You will always get fraudulent clicks from both Google SERP pages and content sites. It's an expense you have to cost in with PPC advertising. And a lot probably does depend on the area. You have already suggested that Adsense was responsible for the "click-bot" problem, and the one of the original respondents clarified that they were not.
Spin a tune so many times, and people will start humming it, even if you dont have any evidence. From the Adsense forum, it seems the general consensus is that google is being very strict on patterns that may suggest fraudulent clicks.. and to many - too strict...
With our Adwords we disabled them only a few days after content ads started and that was a long time before Adsense was launched. For us it was too expensive now this may have been because of the fact that at that time most content partners had a majority of US or high end European customers...
In my opinion, Google made a big mistake when it started out with big corporate "content partners." Such sites aren't likely to deliver the quality of traffic that you'd get with a more targeted site, because they're catering to the general reader. AdSense is a much better vehicle for niche products and services, because targeting involves more than pairing matching ads to content: It also requires matching ads to audiences.
Consider the merchant who's selling digital cameras. When Google started the content-partners program, the merchant's AdWord might have appeared on a "how digital cameras work" page at HowStuffWorks. It doesn't take a genius to figure that the reader who clicks through from that kind of page is less likely to be a hot prospect than the reader who clicks through from a camera-review page at Imaging Resource or Digital Photography Review.
Again, the key to direct-response marketing is reaching the right audience. To use an offline analogy, trying to sell niche products via a general-interest site is like trying to sell ham-radio equipment in TIME or POPULAR SCIENCE when you could be using 73 (a magazine published specifically for radio amateurs).
