protection against clickers

Is there a software against proxies?

[Basil]

It came to my attention that there is evil people out there who click on their competition Adwords with something called proxies? They do that till your daily limit is up. That prevents sales and costs you on clicks. Please tell me if there is something out there that can protect a website from that?

Is google using anything to protect their customers against it? I spend about $50 a day in Adwords, and just these past two days I see clicks but no orders.

Help,
Basil

[ByronM]

I'm hoping google does use something to limit this.

Speaking for our PPC advertising system we use the ORB/Spamming lists to locate "exploited" proxies that are notorious for email spamm and use this to crosslink with our auditing & fruad protection.

Some proxies are legit - especially when related to businesses and even AOL/Juno and other "5x normal dialup speed" networks (basically proxying requests to cache it to make it appear faster)

[Basil]

Are you saying we are protected by google?

[Brett_Tabke]

Well, according to 'sources', the ppc engines belong to all the public/private proxy lists out there and filter off the proxy ip's.

[pmkpmk]

I can't see how anybody - not even Google - should be able to find out usage across proxies.

I actually do this very frequently to see what ad's are displayed in different countries. I live in Europe, and even if I use google.com and not my national version of google, I get different ad's than somebody from the US.

So I use a US-based proxy to see what ad's for my keywords are displayed over there. While using this proxy, Google thinks - and I can't imagine any way for them not to think so - that I'm in the US. Because by using the proxy I actually AM!

And - yes - I clicked on some ad's, merely to learn how they handle it, if they direct to a special page, if they pass additional paramters to the URL etc. I'm aware that this costs the ad-poster money, but I consider this legitimate use.

[Basil]

We are talking about people who would click hundreds of times in less than a minute so that person would use up their daily limit.

[pmkpmk]

I'm well aware of this. But if I click once, or if I click one hundred times - the basic problem of tracing clicks back through proxies is the same.

The basic idea of proxies is, that it's not the user, but the PROXY who fetches the page.

I'm afraid there's nothing you or Google can do about abuse of this kind. Only if the abusee would be stupid enough to issue 100 clicks within 2 seconds or not change the proxy for each fraudulent click so all 100 clicks come frome the same IP.

[Basil]

So is it safe to say that 100 clicks thru one ip address is the same as one click?

[pmkpmk]

Let's say it this way: if I would have designed that system, I would have built in some sort of "timeout per IP". That means that multiple clicks in a given period would be counted as ONE click. The period, however, needs to be rather small since dialup-users or users with dynamically assigned IP's share a pool of IP's. As a first step I would chose something between 5 and 30 minutes.

But that's only how I would have done it. No guarantee that Google has implemented it that way. Even though I assume they have something like that....

[DingoNY]

Did we ever get any real resolution on this?

I'm getting some really high CTR's right now on some items and have some concerns that they aren't "real" new potential customers.

I don't have to know exactly what google does to inhibit competitor clicking... Whether it is IP based or cookie based - but I'd like to know they do SOMETHING to protect against this.

[nyet]

I am sure they do everytihing possible to prevent this. I am also sure that it is impossible to detect all fraudulent clicks ('fraudulent clicks', now *there* is a new millineum phrase!)

I also imagine it is in everyone's interest that they not disclose everything they are doing to detect these clicks.

Have you contacted them about getting credit?

[AdWordsAdvisor]

I don't have to know exactly what google does to inhibit competitor clicking... Whether it is IP based or cookie based - but I'd like to know they do SOMETHING to protect against this.

DingoNY, as an AdWords employee I can assure you that your clicks and impressions are filtered for suspicious activity. Any clicks or impressions judged as invalid, by a variety of means, will be filtered - and do not appear in your account stats.

Also, nyet is quite correct in post #11, on all points.

AWA

[grandpa]

I created a new campaign the other day, with very small daily budget. I got 38 clicks and not a single sale. The entire daily budget was used up. This happened over 2 days. Considering that my ads are 'supposed to be' driving people interested in what I'm offering, the conversion rate seems pretty low. I haven't checked my daily logs for that period yet, but it could be interesting to see where those clicks came from.

[nyet]

We get 10 sales per 8000 clicks! (we make a very tidy profit) it all depends on what you are selling, your business model, and your profit margin.

there is NO rule of thumb.

You shoud *certainly* look at your logs and also look at google conversion/tracking data, you won't know much without looking at the data!

[grandpa]

you won't know much without looking at the data!

I don't know much after looking at the data... but that's slowly coming around too, along with everything else. I didn't mean to imply that I expect a sale from a limited campaign. I didn't even include any tracking data, so to be fair I should shut up now.

It seems odd however, that many of the multiple requests for my index page are clustered around that campaign.

**.**.***.179 16/Apr/2004:00:59:14
**.**.***.179 16/Apr/2004:01:02:25
**.**.***.179 16/Apr/2004:01:04:37
**.**.***.179 16/Apr/2004:01:13:02

4 clicks in 15 minutes using Google search, for a phrase that contained one of my keywords but was not relevant to my site. The only place those could have come from was AdWords. That same search phrase does not return my site in organic serps.

That's just one example.

[d_stew]

grandpa -

I would take a serious look at your keywords. In fact, this is the first thing that I would be inclined to reevaluate.

If you're getting clicks, but those click are not turning into sales, then the people clicking your ads are probably expecting something other than what you're offering.

[DingoNY]

Thanks AWA - good to know you guys are watching out for us.

I ended up with a ton of small sales yesterday based on that incredible volume. I didn't necessarily make a ton of profit - but I didn't lose money at least.