Today, I woke up this AM to find that I had already received over 6000 clicks for this Ad Group. Did some checking, and about 5990 out of 6000 were from AOL, all for the EXACT same 3-term (and somewhat rare) search term. Checked IPs, and they were coming from a wide variety of IPs, but all with the exact term, all typed identically (i.e. all lower cases, perfect spaces, no caps, mispellings, etc.). I thought this was particularly odd, and did a bit more checking. In the 30 mins or so that passed while I researched, another 1300'ish clicks came in, all for the same keyword. I decided to pause the Ad Group - and good thing - it appears that this traffic DID NOT convert worth a lick.
If it had not been AOL, I would have assumed this was fraud of some type. Even now, and given the apparent conversions (will know more tomorrow on that), I still wonder if it is fraud. I should mention of course that this Ad Group is set to Search only - not Content.
Has anyone else seen anything similar? Any recourse if it ends up the traffic did not convert? Is there any way to tell Google I do not want to buy AOL traffic, so I can resume the Ad Group (which normally gets almost all of it's traffic from Google itself)?
Yes, I used to have 25,000 impressions a day (not clicks) from a content match source but after a while it suddenly disappeared, Couldn't figure out why it happened.
> I woke up this AM to find that I had already received over 6000 clicks
Unless your three-word phrase relates directly to news that broke overnight, it's fraud, and I'd report it as such unless you enjoy paying money for nothing. If you had published on content sites, I could see how your ads might have ended up on a popular blog page or something like that, but if these are all coming from supposedly-individual searches, they are very suspicious.
Report it.
Jim
