phantom clicks

[adsforcash]

I've heard on this forum and in other places about how people purposely click on other people's ads to incur outrageous fees.

To all you vets out there, is this something that should be of big concern? And how does one protect oneself?

Thanks in advance!

[skibum]

There have been some reports here and there, some securing refunds. Ya just have to watch your referral traffic like a hawk & keep an eye on any strange trends, surges for clicks on specific keywords, tons of clicks from the same IP, etc...

[Glenn Livingston]

I don't think you can stop your competitors from doing this. However, Google's technology prevents multiple charges from the same IP address within a certain time period (right?) So the worst they can do is charge you a bogus click here and there.

Solution seems to be to track your conversions carefully. If you can justify your cost per lead or sale based upon your resulting ROI, then you're winning. Yes, of course there's noise in the data (bogus clicks, unqualified people who you don't really want to target but mistakenly do, technical glitches like your website not responding for an hour, etc) - but if you consistently measure your conversions, what's important is the trend in your ROI, not each bit of noise.

Hope that helps.

[mcavic]

Google's technology prevents multiple charges from the same IP address within a certain time period (right?)

I don't think this has been confirmed.

[freerunjeff]

I set the default homepage in my browser to a page with adsence ads on it. Even without clicking the ads google caught on that the same user was viewing the site over and over and they have started displaying public service ads.