Also - my logs have NEVER matched their reports - has anyone else had this problem?
as to the logs not matching, ours have never matched either, but they are not that far off. There are good reasons for this. Besides the difference can't amount to more than a few bucks here and there. (for us)
Also, my logs are way off, always have been. Google showed 311 referrals and my logs show 12. That is a big difference. When I asked about it they said "We can't verify the logs you just have to trust us".
While possible, I can't see why they would do that.....
Google showed 311 referrals and my logs show 12. That is a big difference
No kidding! What are you using for logs? Local server files or a hosted service (webtrends live, iwebtrack, hitbox, etc.)? There are ups and downs to both.
If a page is cached a hosted service will likely count the user on each visit but your server logs would never see it since it never requested the page from your server again. Conversely, if a user has cookies, HTTP_REFERER, or other crap blocked in their browser settings or by third party programs like Norton Internet Security, the hosted web stats services won't see them at all.
For my sites I run both a hosted service and use the server logs. They are NEVER exactly the same, but are usually pretty close. If Google is saying they delivered 311 clicks I'm inclined to believe they did. Their reports are usually pretty consistent with my own web stats.
Are your ads displayed on the third party (AdSense) sites? Try disabling those - sometimes people run bots to click their ads so they can make money for themselves at your expense. Google usually catches those people and kills their AdSense account, but they never refund YOUR money that was wasted on those evil users.
In March I showed 0 referrals they showed 8 in April I show 0 and they show 21 and in May I show 12 and they show 311. This has been going on since I started this campaign. I have contacted them three times about it. There has never been any real concern on their end, just the "trust us" response - so I did until this overcharge on my account - something isn't right.
There is one way to know for sure though, and that's to use a Tracking URL. A tracking URL is a regular URL with some extra crap in the querystring that you can use for targeting. It's a much more accurate way to count how many clicks you're getting than the referring document.
Instead of having your AdWords ads link to www.example.com have them link to www.example.com/?track=adwords
Then when you look through your logs, if you see the URL with /?track=adwords" in it you'll know where the visitor came from. It won't interfere with your website at all, but I suspect your problem is that you're relying on the referer and that's just not accurate these days.
Do this now - log into AdWords RIGHT NOW (if you're still using them of course) and make this change. You should be able to tell the difference in your results right away.
If I can get the overcharge issue straightened out, I'll try what you have suggested. Right now I have paused everything.
Didn't you say your campaigns magically started running again even though you had paused them? You should go ahead and modify your target URLs now even though your campaign is paused just incase that happens again. I don't expect that Google will reimburse or credit you for it though ... whether you re-activated the URLs yourself or someone logged in as you and did it, Google still delivered the traffic to you. I hope you can get it worked out though :)
